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Putting in my 2 cents. I used to work as a professional D developer, made a living off of it for a year or two, and then became quickly disillusioned with it. Hell - DMD has not worked for me on aarch64 macOS for the past 6 months, even after updating to the latest version of both macOS / DMD available due to some obscure linker error that I sincerely cannot be assed to dig into. It just doesn't work, so I've just avoided writing D like the plague (or just use ldc, which has always worked!).
In my eyes, D is like the perfect embodiment of "move fast, and break things", but sans the "you need to fix those things at some point after you break them", and like OP mentioned, so incredibly frustrating to deal with.
I tried. I genuinely did. But there are so many rough edges, as well as a complete reluctance to try New Ideas That Are Proven To Work Elsewhere. Because we have to do it the D way -- whatever the hell that means.
I'm personal friends with a few engineers at Facebook, and learned the reason why Facebook dropped D. I mean, hell, there was huge internal hype about it there, as well as major investment in the language; it was seen as the replacement to C++ and was paraded around as the Next Great Thing (TM). Hell - they even hired on Andrei & Walter, as well integrated it fully into Buck (Facebook's internal build tool). You know what happened? Facebook engineers ran into so many headaches and issues with D that they chose to drop it entirely, and in its place came a language that you might've heard of: Rust. Need proof? Look at what languages are implemented in Buck2 - you'll notice that there's a stark lack of D anywhere.
I'm genuinely shocked that D is still used in production anywhere. It feels like you need to take the Symmetry approach of writing your own standard library (and be incredibly selective about which features you use - e.g. the majority of Mir is written with @safe @pure @nogc, which made it an absolute joy to work with) just to even be able to use it in a remotely productive way. And even then, you start to run into some serious rough edges with dmd and work around compiler issues all the time.
This doesn't even get into my criticisms of the language itself. The level of compiler metaprogramming that D encourages its users to use has so many footguns, combined with a compiler that has so many incredibly bizarre design decisions (seriously, DMD has caused me to OOM my entire system on multiple occasions) that I've become incredibly incredibly skeptical that it was a good idea to begin with.
Now I write Rust professionally and don't have any of these pains. I have new pains, of course, but at least my "new pains" are addressed by the community / language maintainers in a reasonable timeframe, whereas some of the compiler bugs I've reported have gone unseen unless I made an absolute fuss about it on the Discord. I don't have to worry about my crates magically breaking if I update the compiler. I don't need to worry about my code randomly getting slower to compile if I update the compiler. I can use every part of the standard library and not have to worry about (x) or (y) - unlike tar pits like std.regex, or std.string. Sure, the cognitive load is higher since I now need to worry about ownership / borrowing, and I sometimes need to fight the borrow checker, but in return I get a language that is incredibly reliable & ergonomic to use.
I wish you all well, and I wish D could've worked out. I really wanted to like the language. There are so many great lessons that can be learned from D. But viewed holistically, I cannot recommend any new developers to write any code in D.
