I love Meteor for what it is, but at scale there are things that are frustrating and better solved by other tools.
I’ve had the same experience as @stolinski regarding hosting. Galaxy is the only thing close to zero config, but it’s expensive, deploys are slow and hard to troubleshoot, scaling is tricky to reason about, etc., which makes it a tough sell when it’s just a layer on top of AWS.
I also think what makes Meteor great is what makes it painful: magic, isomorphism, speciailized Meteor packages, etc.
Magical things are hard to debug and reason about. Isomorphism sets a hard requirement on an agreed upon API between front and back ends. Specialized Meteor packages come with their own maintenance hurdles and lack of support by way of a smaller community of users.
I think it’s easy to look at a team like @veered’s and say: Look at the amazing, large scale thing they built with Meteor. But if you follow their involvement, you’ll also know that their team are Meteor experts. They have custom tooling and solutions built around Meteor. I think that they were able to build something so scalable with Meteor is more of a testament to their team than anything, especially considering they did so much of that before people like @diaconutheodor were making meaningful contributions to the scalability of Meteor.
I think an overarching theme of this community is that the flow of individuals and organizations is now probably at a net negative, if you’re looking at month over month numbers. Meteor is great for small scale and medium scale projects, but I feel like it can’t really compete at large or enterprise scale applications without Meteor experts on board.
MDG doesn’t do much marketing on behalf of Meteor now, so the influx of people using Meteor as a springboard is pretty much gone now. I think that this is the general vibe that contributes to FUD, not lack of faith in the project. Anyone who follows Meteor knows that @benjamn is a genius and has pretty much singlehandledly built Meteor into a tool that is superior to things like webpack in many ways. His work has obviously influenced other tool-driven devs for quite a while.
I’d love to see a Meteor renaissance as that springboard/MVP tool that gets you some $$ and allows you to transition your project over time to more mature and scalable tech, but it doesn’t seem like that’s the position people want it to take.