He probably means when I took VC funding in 2019 and started to rip apart the framework to try build a platform and business. The 2-3 years after were very chaotic.
My goal was never to serve the community but instead leverage it to build a business. Ultimately that failed. The truth is it's very difficult to sustain open source. Go-micro was never the end goal. It was always a stepping stone to a platform e.g microservices PaaS. A lot of hard lessons learned along the way.
Now with Copilot and AI I'm able to go back and fix a lot of issues but nothing will fix trust with a community or the passage of time. People move on. It served a certain purpose at certain time.
Note: The company behind connect-rpc raised $100m but for more of a build system around protobuf as opposed to the rpc framework but this was my thinking as well. The ability to raise $10-20m would create the space to build the platform off the back of the success of the framework.
Obligatory "this is why I love HN" but even for that standard, this is is an incredibly open account, thank you for the insight and sorry it hasn't seemed to pan out quite how you hoped. Still sounds like you got your bag, built something cool, and have your "micro" share of Internet legacy, so not too bad eh?