Please don't spread lies about Elm. It's OK if it's too hard for you, or not your cup of tea.

But it's straightforward to interface JS from Elm. It's right in the tutorial under ports.

JS interop has never been an issue, it's publishing JS-interop packages which is gated[0]: port module is available in applications but not packages.

[0] formerly behind a review queue / review process to add to native-whitelist, now limited to two specific "core" organisations

We have a large Elm app and do the occasional bit of JS interop when required, it's not a problem at all.

The 0.19 change simply limited the ability to publish packages containing interop to the official Elm package repository. You can still host your own packages etc.

You mean ports and flags? It's described right in the tutorial : https://guide.elm-lang.org/interop/ports.html. I wouldn't call it not possible. It is necessary to have the cool stuff of Elm, unfortunately (or not).

It's not rocket science tough, and it allows for clean interfaces. I wrote about it just a couple ago ago : https://lengrand.fr/a-short-introduction-to-ports-and-flags-...

If you need your IO to be synchronous, then Elm is not for you.

Asynchronous IO through ports works just fine.

I don't think there will ever be a way to interface js directly from elm or vise versa. Ports are the only way.