I am only a hobbyist user of Elm, but the original post also made me sad.

Here's an interview from 2017 with Evan where he discusses Elm's approach to interop. https://elmtown.simplecast.fm/b06499a6 Skip to about 8.5 minutes in.

While Luke's approach certainly could have been better, I don't think it had any bearing on the result. The reason for not allowing Javascript into Elm libraries seems fundamental to what Elm is trying to achieve.