No doubt everything could've been learned and heeded by now, I think it's really, really, really hard to say "OK, so then everyone should go and try to raise $4000/mo for the new project they have." Even just using a programming language is an investment of time and trust, too, lest you want to wind up stranded on some-old-version-of-Elm island with tens of thousands of lines of code.

Elm also seemed very promising in the beginning, and honestly I don't even think that comment is so abhorrent on its own. I think Elm died the death of a thousand cuts. If it had only been one errant comment somewhere, it would've been mostly forgotten about by now. Instead, it's Elm that's mostly forgotten about.

So I say best of luck, but also... No thanks for now.

edit: Just so it's completely clear, I am actually implying that "maintainers being dicks" was actually not the problem with Elm. I think people just got especially infuriated by it because they were sick of trying to deal with Elm's breaking changes, of which this represented one. I remember going through and learning Elm and like literally months later everything was completely different and I no longer knew how to make a basic hello world application (around 0.16 or 0.17 maybe? Can't recall. I just remember that effects had changed a fair bit.) I know that to some degree this is the nature of a 0.x product, but at some point it's like "OK... then who is supposed to even use this?" Among other issues of course.