It got press because one of the founders was heavily involved in creating Yarn & very publicly critical of Yarn 2. That general repute (both positive & negative) brought attention to Rome. That's all there was to it.
At least in the JavaScript community (perhaps not the wider tech community) I would say that Sebastian McKenzie was even more well known as the creator of Babel.
JS tooling has been a mess since its inception. Here came Rome with promises of it just working and doing everything at once. Of course people sucked it up.
Now whenever I read of "upcoming tools" I couldn't care less. Show me the tool and then we can talk. I'm still waiting for the features that Webpack 4 promised a decade ago.
Broadly, you're not wrong. But I see this sort of exceptionalism quite a lot: "<ecosystem> tooling is terrible". Terrible relative to what? I work with tooling across a wide range of languages - some do it better than others but I wouldn't say JS is exceptionally bad relative to others.
E.g. Python tooling has been some of the worst for a long time. Recently Astral have been making positive changes to this (& I note the cross-pollination of Astral & BiomeJS devs) but across the ecosystem things are broadly still terrible on average, especially in fragmentation terms. C/C++ has less of a fragmentation issue & more of a non-adoption-of-anything-standard-at-all issue (Make doesn't count when every Makefile is custom). Java tooling isn't too fragmented as long as you're an IDE user - but it's so locked into UIs & the cli tooling is horrific.
There's problems all over. JS is honestly one of the least worst I've seen.
