I think that’s a valid criticism. Although I have grown to love Raycast, it still needs to prove itself. Alfred, on the other hand, doesn’t.
As to the funding, I think because of the reasons I mentioned up top (especially because extensions are built in Typescript and React), any standard web dev today could build tons of custom tooling for their company using Raycast. I say this as someone who convinced my company to buy Keyboard Maestro for everyone on my team and has custom coded probably 25 admin tools for my team (this was one, FWIW: Custom HTML Prompt to search Zendesk Articles - #2 by Cpenned). The problem is that my code is mostly hacked together using random web technologies and KM actions, so you have to know KM and have access to my original files to update it. If I would have written these tools using Raycast, the custom apps would be available and alterable by nearly any web dev today. I built most of our tooling using my preferred web tooling, built the files, and then added them as custom HTML prompts in Keyboard Maestro. While powerful, that path obscures the source code and isn’t easy to alter without ME doing something—not a great selling point for a company. I’m getting into the weeds too much, but I think my original reasons up top (especially number 3) are the hope for the company-funded route. If companies can have web devs on their team quickly spin up tooling for their company in such a common dev stack, it might make an investment make sense.
Time will tell if Raycast will hang, but for now I’m excited about its future and direction.