If I recall, Enlightenment used to have a rather focal fan base at one time. The DE was a lot prettier than most of its contemporaries, and was relatively lightweight despite having animated effects and everything. I always thought EFL was one of the hidden gems of the Linux ecosystem that was left in GTKs and Qts shadow, but after reading the article (back when it was first published) I realized there was probably a good reason it never got popular. I thought the story was embellished, as thedailywtf articles typically are, with the “SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! Naughty programmer!” stuff, so I downloaded EFL source code and checked. OMG, it was a real error message. (Though I believe it has since been removed.)
The company in question using EFL was (probably) Samsung, who apparently still uses it as the native graphical toolkit for Tizen.
This was my experience as well as a developer trying to package an application as an appimage. Creating an appimage that works on your machine is easy. Creating one that actually works on other distros can be damn near impossible unless everything is statically linked and self contained in the first place. In contrast, flatpak’s developer experience is much easier and if it runs, you can be pretty sure it runs elsewhere as well.