Why is this not more popular? Coconut seems like something many people, including me, would want to use for every Python project of sufficient complexity. What's the catch?
The catches:
1. You have to be OK with a compilation step that isn't part of the Python world.
2. To the best of my knowledge the language has been and still is being developed by a single person, so there's the "Evan gets hit by a bus" risk built in.
3. Tooling is virtually nonexistent. There's a Vim plugin that understands the language syntax but there's zero IDE support. Of course you can debug the generated Python with Pycharm/VS Code/etc and having done it I can say it's not terribly painful but isn't terribly fun either.
I think that over time the lack of tooling will be the biggest hindrance to the language's further adoption. OTOH I'd be curious to know if this has been a major factor in other unpopular languages remaining unpopular. I seem to remember a lot of complaints about tooling in the early days of Scala but the language still managed to become fairly successful once that situation improved.
Edit: formatting, final thoughts