You see it as appeal to authority, I see it as the community of frontend developers, based on Swift and Rust integration experience, and work done by Chris Lattner, while working at Google, feedbacking into what the evolution of LLVM IR is supposed to look like.

Mojo and Flang, were designed from scratch using MLIR, as there are many other newer languages on the LLVM ecosystem.

I see it as the field experience of folks that know a little bit more than I ever will about compiler design.