ROCm is not just unpopular, it is so boilerplate-ridden, it is nearly unusable. It takes about 5x more code to do things there compared to CUDA.

Yes, “just use libraries”. But as Andrej Karpathy used to say, “I don't need some library holding my hand and providing abstractions. Real men command GPUs with their own raw kernel code”.

(And, incidentally, there are much less libraries for ROCm, for this reason. Somebody should write them, and why do that with something that takes 5x more code to do the same thing?)