A release with smaller bundle is an amazing technical achievement but doesn't really address the underlying language and ecosystem issues.
We sure do in the Elm community! I suspect this has more to do with who you follow than anything else. :)
For example, if you follow a lot of React folks, you're naturally going to hear a lot more about Reason, because there's a lot of overlap in the people who work on those projects.
Come check out our #beginners channel on Elm Slack sometime! It's constantly buzzing with activity:
Elm continues to be our #1 source of applicants, and none of them mention an interest in Reason...but then again, it would make sense that Reason, being newer and endorsed by Facebook, would have more interest in the overall JS community!
I always feel like Bucklescript and the Ocaml ecosystem doesn't get enough love when Elm crops up. Bucklescript has been doing aggressive dead code elimination for some time, and comes with the full type system of ocaml — plus easy JS interop: https://github.com/BuckleScript/bucklescript/wiki/Why-buckle....
As Elm develops I'm finding it harder and harder to choose between bucklescript/ocaml/reason and Elm. It's awesome to have all of these modern tools to work with on the frontend.