I haven’t used Effect but the problem I see with using it is that it seems to want to completely swallow the whole app architecture. At that point, why not just use a functional language?

I can’t think of a single functional language that offers what effect gives you, though. A fully typed and declarative error channel, managed dependency layer with compile time safety, excellent resource management, the best parsing/validating/serializing library I’ve used in TypeScript, concurrency, streams, cache, otel primitives baked in…

In all fairness it does require buy-in and gradual adoption isn’t perfectly seamless or frictionless, but I think it’s worth it. They’ve done an outstanding job with it.

Yes, your hunch is correct.

Which functional language has a similarly huge ecosystem, works across the frontend/backend, has first class support of different runtimes, provides similar ergonomics, has meetups and conferences in so many countries and is easy to hire for (all you need is solid TypeScript)?

There's a reason effect-ts keeps spreading despite its syntax and learning curve, and I say it as somebody that used Haskell, functional Scala, Purescript, Elm, Racket, Elixir and tested another half a dozen.

Give me an Elixir with properly powerful types (not gleam) and I'm in.

I'd gladly throw effect and typescript especially out of my work day, but I see no sane replacement at complexity scaling.

I wouldn't personally recommend effect without a solid champion in the team and without having the complexity needs for it (I'm talking recurring durable worklows, complex encodings, suspension, retries, etc) and even if you have them the price is steep without a champion, but that's my 2 cents.

You use it for an agentic cli (opencode uses it e.g.) not a simple crud (which is 90% of web dev industry).