I think you're saying Evan is the BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) for Elm, except it's interesting you chose the word 'despot' because many of the decisions made with Elm are far from benevolent (like preventing certain library usage and interop if the code isn't hosted on github, within the elm org).
The criticism is valid. Haskell is painfully strict and, still, it offers various ways out of its guarantees. Rust is painfully strict and gives you `unsafe`. Neither of them break your build if you don't host your code in a specific github org.
I purposely avoided 'BDFL': too much precedent as to what that means!
Limiting certain kinds of js access to vetted libraries is benevolent, if that's part of the language's goals. Likewise the lack of type classes or mutability/unsafe escape hatches.
Elm's developers do not enforce constraints to be 'hostile' or 'far from benevolant'. It's a tradeoff - language power for certain guarantees, guarantees that not even Haskell can provide.
Unfortunately, this sometimes means trying to constrain access to the completely unconstrained js library ecosystem, so the solution, at least for now, is a bit of a blunt weapon.
Note that Elm doesn't 'break your build' if you don't use github - that's a constraint on linking to official libraries only. I don't use github and my code works just fine.
The criticism is valid. Haskell is painfully strict and, still, it offers various ways out of its guarantees. Rust is painfully strict and gives you `unsafe`. Neither of them break your build if you don't host your code in a specific github org.