Yes, nothing different from any other VC dev tool startup. When the community fractures people simply move on to something else. See rome -> biome for a very recent example.

I mostly agree. But without argument, I can point out that a modern webapp requires tooling for capabilities like testing, linting, formatting, and bundling. Vite (and its ecosystem) has proven its mettle, and when it comes to being able to understand your dependencies, I'll take fewer, and simpler, and way faster, and more coherent, and more independent of misaligned corporate influence, every time. It's not even a trade-off, it's just better. I have deep expertise in wrangling eslint plugins and prettier configs and webpack, and am so grateful that's all in the rear-view mirror. An astonishing percentage of the world's most popular websites are built on a fragile and nearly-incomprehensible stack which no sane developer would choose. VoidZero (and TanStack, FWIW) are a breath of fresh air in making it possible to reason about your frontend tooling and architecture, and stepping away from unnecessary complexity and/or vendor lock-in. Of course it will eventually change. But as someone who's been building and improving web-based experiences for a living since the late 90's (for tiny startups and F500 enterprises and everything between), this is as good as it's ever been, and I recommend it without reservation.

Not all corporations are the same. I've worked in multiple regulated environments over the years and always been able to vet and experiment with tools. Also, your second sentence contradicts your first.