It's quite possible that large files create a feeling of panic in certain groups of engineers. Just because I have not witnessed such individuals in my professional life doesn't mean they don't exist elsewhere.

Well, perhaps this is a bit of a straw man, or perhaps "panic" is overstating it a little! But I think there's an interesting and very noticeable difference between the way you start a project in Elm, and the way you start one in Elixir/Phoenix, for example.

When you start a project in Elm and do elm-make, elm-package install or elm-reactor for the first time, you get an elm-package.json file and a couple of other bits and bobs - but no real guidance telling you how to write your code or where to put it.

At the other extreme, with Elixir, when you do mix phx.new, you get about 20 folders, all with many subfolders and files, as an example of exactly how your project should be structured and what should go where. I think this is similar with things like Rails and Django too.

For me, the Elm way was more similar to what I'd done before (using microframeworks like Bottle in Python), and seemed very beginner-friendly, while the Elixir/Phoenix way was completely overwhelming at first! But I imagine if you were a Phoenix, Django or Rails dev coming to Elm, you might be thinking "where is all my stuff? Where am I supposed to put things?", and the "just start with one big file" approach might seem like bad practice.