It's not a "JavaScript library" it's an entire toolchain. In the same way that `git` generated billions of dollars worth of value in the form of companies and productivity, Rome will do the same. Possibly even bigger.
I have no doubt that Rome will massively increase the producitvity of thousands of companies and developers. But the hard thing in open source is how will you capture some portion of that value. The vast majority of libraries, toolchains and other open source projects out there which has massively increased the developer producitivty are underfunded let alone generate millions of dollars in sales. Rome not only has to find a sustainable way for funding the project as well as figure out a way to 100x the returns of VCs? How is Rome planning to do that?
> I have no doubt that Rome will massively increase the producitvity of thousands of companies and developers
I would like to see that measured.
My suspicion is that many developers are already too reliant on tooling and that reliance harms productivity rather than improves it. Bundling those tooling concerns eliminates some operational costs associated with a plurality of tools but increases dependency upon the tool.
This problem is not a technical problem (as in how do I solve a problem), but a cultural problem (as in what is the proper way to solve a problem). It comes down to the difference between a product focus (what do we ship) versus an operational focus (what do we work on).
I think you're being very selective with what you call "tooling" here. I understand where it's coming from though, and I agree that in some circumstances people are adhering too much to what might be perceived as "standards" instead of building or using something more fit to the task.
On the contrary I would also say that I see a lot of developers not being reliant enough on tooling. A simple example is getting very acquainted with the debugger in your language of choice. It's very common to sprinkle logs everywhere instead of properly learning how to step through code.
I mean tooling as generally as possible, everything outside your application's execution runtime and the shell it runs in. Of course developer's will benefit from a code editor and a language compiler (assuming there aren't many), but how much tooling do you really need to deliver a product?
To your second point, I remember when git was announced. I remember it was such a breath of conceptual fresh air over what I had been using (svn, mercurial) for me. I use it because it makes a lot more sense to me and how I work, and I've never worked on the linux kernel.
GitHub, yeah absolutely, but git makes no money because noone pays for git.
Likewise, noone pays for command line package managers (in fact I doubt anyone pays for a command-line tool at all). So its ok to say it generates value, but if you can't caputre that value its not a sound business model.