Made me think about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43041923 where they mention Atom as well

It would be relevant that they were the team behind Atom if they seemed to understand the lessons of Atom...

Instead of learning from what worked and fixing what didn't, they just threw everything away and wandered off in some totally different direction. They did the reactionary kind of learning instead of the theory-building kind: https://xkcd.com/242/