>Pharo is specifically designed for commercial and industrial applications and not as a research environment. Partnering with private capital has been one source of funding for the project.

Does Pharo have a user base comparable to other programming environments?

If Pharo were really used in large-scale commercial and industrial applications, it would be as popular as Python, Java or C++. And it is far from it.

I repeat, "Pharo is very, very fast, you can build a GUI application..." is not something that is sells today, and if it were so competitively, companies would use Pharo instead of Flutter, Swift, etc. and on a large scale.