Elm has always been that way. Trying to say that this is new behaviour and a sign of it “not going well” is a bit off-base I think.

Sure, the particular behaviour and choices of the core team are one of be reasons I don’t use it in production. But they don’t try and hide it, and it’s certainly not new!

That's too bad. I didn't know that this isn't new because I recently was looking more closely at front-end web development.