TIming was hardly an issue since they didn't produce anything important. moreover, their first focus was on formatter, which can be as low priority for any dev as it gets.
Even Vite+ is focused on vite and rolldown first, and formatter last.
Even Vite+ is focused on vite and rolldown first, and formatter last.
But when SWC/Esbuild came around to prove how much faster and efficient the compilation can be when written in a more performant language like Rust or Go, all hype around Rome died because no one wanted another Javascript toolchain.
Turbopack is backed by Vercel who obviously have a lot more capital behind them, but it's also built on Rust and at least has the potential to compete.