OK, I see where you’re coming from. You’re interpreting “anti” as “dislike”. Have you considered interpreting it as those who don’t use and don’t want to use flakes?

Just because there is disagreement, doesn’t mean that it has to be tied to negative emotions like hate or dislike.

😂 why do you believe that?

The article clearly states otherwise

Flakes also are a symptom or cause of much intra-community strife between “pro-flakes” and “anti-flakes” factions

It must be nice to have never productionized a prototype; meanwhile, in the land of startups, putting experiments into production is standard operating procedure, despite being a bad idea.

You’re making assumptions. I worked in startups that did took great care not to beta software or libs. We were in production and changing stuff all the time - multiple times a day, but that was one of the rules. When you work with time-sensitive, always on environments with world-wide customers, bringing down production for multiple hours could mean the end your company in those early stages.
Maybe I was extra-ordinarily lucky with the startups I was in.

Just because other startups do it, doesn’t mean that it has to be done.

Flakes are optional

I think the bigger point is that they are experimental. Who wants to go into production with experimental stuff? Unfortunately, if my employer were to read a suggestion of using experimental stuff in production, it would be immediately rejected.
nix itself, however, has been getting some people interested at work and if things go well, might be integrated into production solutions we sell to customers.