I have been using Swift for a month, so I am a beginner. It has some modern features, but it is lacking any real sense of community and feels very incomplete. Its threading and IPC models are clunky and its network code makes XMLHttp
Moving from Linux to Apple development has been a shock: All the gate keeping to keep me out of their hardware - after a month I still cannot reliably put my code on iOS - not for technical reasons but for license reasons.
Swift really suffers for coming from this environment. IMO leave it alone unless you have to develop for Apple hardware - and if you have to develop for Apple hardware - that is a business problem and you need to solve it.
As part of the Swift community (and the Objective-C and Mac/iOS community for years before that), I disagree that there's no community around Swift. I think the problem is that it's still very Apple platforms focused. If you're an iOS developer, you'll find a big community, and one that has been focused on Swift specifically for the past 6 years (to the point that there are complaints about that, e.g. https://twitter.com/phughes/status/1307024158275112965). There are many conferences every year (well, until this year), plenty of people on Twitter, blogs, multiple community Slack teams, etc. Just in my local area (metro area of ~2 million) we have a 750 person strong, very active Slack team for iOS/Mac/Swift development, and two separate monthly in-person meetup groups (again, before COVID).
If I were a Swift developer focused on Linux or Windows, though, it'd be a whole different story. The author of the linked blog post is a member of the Swift core team, and did most of the work to bring Swift to Windows himself, but outside of him, I don't really know anyone particularly focused on it.
(I've also made a very decent living for 15 years developing almost exclusively for Apple platforms, so I disagree with your last paragraph too, but that's another thing altogether.)
Moving from Linux to Apple development has been a shock: All the gate keeping to keep me out of their hardware - after a month I still cannot reliably put my code on iOS - not for technical reasons but for license reasons.
Swift really suffers for coming from this environment. IMO leave it alone unless you have to develop for Apple hardware - and if you have to develop for Apple hardware - that is a business problem and you need to solve it.