> - keeps their clients tied to their services

I have heard this claim so many times but it is easy to prove it wrong given how much we focus on documentation and understandability around Elixir and main libs. I have had clients asking me questions and I would answer it by improving the docs or writing a guide, committing it to the repo, and then asking the client for feedback. Half of the Ecto guides were written like this.

It is not about keeping clients at all. It is about having a great on-boarding (and beyond) experience.