The first release was just Go's parser ripped out and bolted onto a barebones first year of college level compiler, and touted as "safer than Rust", "compiles in milliseconds", etc. but didn't even have real type-checking at the time, nor did it free memory, and many other basic functionality. Furthermore, I vividly remember the author's Patreon advertised at the top of the page back then, and for a while he raked in a couple thousand dollars a month for it.

However, over the years some actually talented people (and nowadays probably LLMs) have somehow sort of fixed most of the biggest warts, but it's still nowhere near what it advertised in that first release.

It was impossible to verify the "earth shattering claims" of the designer/users early on, and they would be very very emotional every time you just question the metrics. At one point there was a chart that was basically "for a given task, every compiler on earth: 1min, us: 0.1sec"

And whenever you poke you found it seemed to be comparing apple and oranges and conversations often ended in v users crying because "this is a new project !"

(yet, the crowd kept growing and they seemed to have produced larger and larger projects with this thing)

I have no opinion on the subject but I have found this to be an interesting dive into the supposed controversy: https://justinas.org/the-bizarre-world-of-v