I'm trying not to make this just about dune. Dune is curtainly BETTER than, say Make n friend to newcomers.
But there's a market for programming languages that OCaml is objectively losing. Can we really not agree that the most popular/recommended build tool requiring you to write a lisp to do basic config probably isn't helping draw new user into the fold?
I doesn't have to be cargo. But the more it rhymes with that degree of user experience, the more the "masses" will discover the things that make ocaml great.
I agree that dune is worse in many important ways than the build systems of languages like Rust and Go (where they were developed at the same time as the language, rather than 20 years later). But dune config files aren't lisp. They're s-expressions, which have the same syntax as lisp but are just static data like json/yaml/toml (and once you get used to them, I think most people prefer them to those).
It makes sense. We know how to deworm. That is an execution problem. The ones I find more interesting are in planning stages, such as how to we fix or supersede capitalism, how do we mitigate climate change, how do we persuade people in power those things need to be done before the problem is so big it becomes intractable.