Wow, thanks Chad for this write up. I think your summary is very accurate.
(Clarification: I used to work with Chad, at that company. Matter of fact, I was the one who hired him.)
Chad outlined things so greatly that I don’t even have much to add to the points he mentioned so well, but I can give a bit of my perspective on the matter:
The two years I was there for were marked by huge changes. Organizationally, staff-wise, technology and product-wise, and also strategically. I have never seen more people come and go in such a short period of time as at that company then.
Trying to create some stability for the frontend team in an environment when everything changed daily, we took the opportunity to write lots of Elm code in our newly created microfrontend architecture. To me the most important thing was teaching people Elm, which had varying levels of acceptance.
There were no solid arguments against Elm. They all pretty much boiled down to “I prefer React because I already know it” in various disguises and that is ok. Not everyone will agree on this. However, there was nothing technical in the Elm projects that would’ve forced anyone to not use Elm. In fact Elm was great for stability, asset size and (if people had learned enough) development speed.
However, like Chad said, high acceptance for Elm and helping others learn would have been hugely important. It sounds strange when you read “I was not allowed to help others” but there were forces in that companies that were very political and I would there was quite some back-stabbing behavior going on. In hindsight I should’ve been more outspoken against those forces, but at the time I was honestly not 100% clear on the depth of those actions.
Anyway, I agree with Chad that everything stands and falls with having people that are interested in Elm. Unfortunately, the people who are not often have reasons that tends to convice management more (React is stable, backed by Facebook, enterprise, yadadad) 