To be fair, setting up an instance with your own patch is how improvements are made in the first place. Only a day after I set up my own instance, I forked the repo and started tinkering. Same case with lemm.ee. I'm a software engineer by profession but this is the first time I've touched Rust and inferno (I use typescript but with React/NextJS, inferno is new to me and pretty interesting). What's funny to me is that lemmynsfw.com was the first highly populated instance I saw which is actually running their own patch. But hey, porn has always had a heavy hand in driving tech. Half of the best features of YT were ripped right out of PornHub.

Mind you, while lemmy-ui will probably be easy to pick up for most frontend devs working with a modern tech stack, I'm sure the main Lemmy repo will drive a lot of devs away just because it's in Rust. But I can see why it's like that. Lemmy is barely a blip in terms of CPU and RAM. The big factor for most instances is really just going to be storage space.