alt Hacker NewsI don't really agree that ML killed their business. I paid for their product early on before it was even done but they never really developed their product. I held out hope to the end of a year and ended up never using my purchase.
Compare that to shadcn, which had visible growing pains and yet reached rocketship fame. Shadcn is evidence that developers were hungry for yet another library, and it's also evidence that users were willing to tolerate rough code on the ride to maturity.
I don't believe Tailwind's component libraries deserved to win.
I agree. I also paid, but the components themselves were hard to use and required quite a bit of work to integrate into our product. For example, most components had a new (slightly different) button and parts of the components didn't have clear boundaries from what I remember.
Besides that, quite quickly there were many other free, and arguably better, alternatives available (like flowbite, preline, daisyui, etc) that I ended up using instead.