Thank you for that thoughtful recollection.
Briefly, I’d like to note the other side of the coin: being the maintainer of a native library. In my case that was elm-socketio and yes, it falls into the whatever.js category, except that it was approved for one version of Elk and then not approved for the next. It was frustrating to not be able to continue supporting my users, and to have to abandon the project, even though it made sense as to why.
More recently, I’ve been shepherding changed to core’s Random module so that elm-test doesn’t need my third-party library. That has had similar levels of uncertainty, delays, and worrying about code being examined under a microscope. (To Evan’s credit, everything is merged now.)
On the flip side, it’s incredibly freeing to know that I can publish anything written in pure Elm and know that it will work and be pleasant for anyone. No approvals, no “sorry you did all this work and can’t publish it”, and no “pretty please read the README and install this extra bit of JavaScript code somewhere in your project”. As a package author, I’m not mourning the native review process either.