I think you are definitely pointing at something that has been a weakness of OCaml for a long time (but as you say is happily changing). But I wouldn't characterise it as elitism; IME the OCaml community is very friendly.
Instead, I think it comes from the fact that when it was first developed in the 90s, it was viewed in the context of C (and this attitude has carried over somewhat to the modern day where it makes much less sense). For example, building non-trivial projects with just the compiler is very painful from most modern perspectives, but it's very similar to what you have to do for C.
Instead, I think it comes from the fact that when it was first developed in the 90s, it was viewed in the context of C (and this attitude has carried over somewhat to the modern day where it makes much less sense). For example, building non-trivial projects with just the compiler is very painful from most modern perspectives, but it's very similar to what you have to do for C.