IMO it's safe to say that Elm is dead and won't come back with this attitude of the core team (which is not the only problem of the language). We never switched to Elm 0.19 from 0.18 but moved on to rewrite in Svelte 5 with TypeScript and never looked back.
I saw these threads pop up here and there over the years, always funny to read comments (even in this very thread!) about how (paraphrasing) "good ideas take time" and "the creator shouldn't add everything people are asking for into the language," meanwhile the last release is still 0.19 in 2018 and I honestly don't know what Evan and the core team have been doing with regards to Elm since then.
There's a vast gulf between being prudent with feature additions, and doing effectively nothing at all. Of course a language that preaches the former but materializes the latter would die sooner or later, as people get fed up with the lack of updates. And in the meantime, TypeScript just gets better and better.
Like even no updates since 2018 might be ok if Evan et all communicated more about the goals and direction of the project
Evan especially wrote and spoke a lot about his philosophy re: the project which I think can be fairly summarized as “everyone just sit down and shut up.” But that’s not a lot to go on when trying to evaluate if a project has staying power, mature governance, and so on.
IMO it's safe to say that Elm is dead and won't come back with this attitude of the core team (which is not the only problem of the language). We never switched to Elm 0.19 from 0.18 but moved on to rewrite in Svelte 5 with TypeScript and never looked back.