Jonathan Blow has shipped two games, Braid is very well liked and The Witness got more mixed opinions but certainly there aren't many people who think it's just terrible - more that it wasn't appealing for them. But two is a very small sample size, and the fact that The Witness annoyed more people isn't necessarily a great sign - given more time and money, Blow made a game he presumably liked better but others did not.

Maybe Jon will like Jai very much when it's done. Is that enough? In some sense maybe. But why should anybody else care?

In 2014 there weren't a lot of people doing this, maybe you'd look around and say "At least somebody is trying something". In 2024 there are plenty of programming languages to choose instead of C++ even if you specifically want to write video games. If you like roughly where Jai wants to be, no interesting ideas just do stuff we know works, there are even other languages in that space, including Odin and Zig.

Millions of people have shipped games, and their quality has little to do with how they're programmed.

Because Johnathan Blow programs in Jai and his experience is talking about the tradeoff set with <technique X> when using Jai.

Since we plebians can't use Jai, that tradeoff is irrelevant.

For example, Jai has hot loading, IIRC (somebody please correct me if I'm wrong). The utility of an embedded scripting language is completely different if your tooling has really good support for hot loading of your engine implementation language.

Furthermore, because we plebians can't use Jai, we can't verify anything said about it in context, either.