alt Hacker NewsDHH has an enormous following and is extremely influential. I don’t think it’s surprising that it gained popularity so quickly. He’s really good at shamelessly plugging his work (as well I hope he should be).
But yeah, I think the vast majority of people using it are first timers to Linux in general. It attracts these people because it doesn’t ask too much of them. I don’t know why anybody would complain about growing the ecosystem. More people using Linux is always a good thing for the community.
I'm not negative to the growth of Linux. However, we should ask ourselves what it means that there has apparently been such a gap in the market of Linux distributions that this project has been able to fill it so swiftly, and why established distributions with steadier technical communities were not able to capture it already.