I REALLY want to use a native ML language[1] but they all seem to be catered towards academics.
If you want success within companies and not universities, then you need to treat the language as a product, serve the customer by investing time into documentation, guides, and branding just like with any product. I say this as a fan of ML languages, posts that complain about another language (OCaml) being more popular even though it is an inferior doesn't get new users.
[1]: I currently use F# daily but would be happy to switch to a variant of SML if it made sense.
I thought F# was native these days?
Not really, at last check it just bundles the entire .Net runtime with the compiled image. It's basically the equivalent of https://github.com/vercel/pkg or similar tools.