Ouch, not just the number, look at the type of issues. "Compiler error...", "compiler panic...", "elm publish hangs indefinitely..."
They never made it to 1.0, so it's not surprising, but major compiler bugs coupled with no chance of a patch (2.5 years since the last bug fix update) definitely suggests the language shouldn't be used in large projects.
Can you please list which of these compiler bugs are _major_?
There was a commonly encountered compiler bug in 0.19.0 (Map.! crash) and the 0.19.1 version was the result of fixing that. During 4 years of writing Elm full-time (close to 500kloc total) I have encountered only a "rank 2 typevar" typechecking bug _once_ and it was easy enough to work around. The Elm code that large projects need doesn't really trigger compiler bugs and crashes of the kind you'd see in the GitHub Issues.
If GCC has some bug reports open about crashes, but your code doesn't really trigger those in practice, would you call GCC unsuited for large projects?
If the last bug fix update on GCC were 2.5 years ago, I would absolutely steer clear! That I haven't run into them yet doesn't mean I won't, and the larger the project the more likely it'll be a problem at some point.
They never made it to 1.0, so it's not surprising, but major compiler bugs coupled with no chance of a patch (2.5 years since the last bug fix update) definitely suggests the language shouldn't be used in large projects.