> There's a reason why…

Incumbency advantage.

Free as-in beer versus commercial proprietary.

etc.

> walled gardens like Smalltalk "images"

Smalltalk has archived code in text files for like 40 years.

1984 "Smalltalk-80 The Interactive Programming Environment" page 46

"Within each project, a set of changes you make to class descriptions is maintained. … Using a browser view of this set of changes, you can find out what you have been doing. Also, you can use the set of changes to create an external file containing descriptions of the modifications you have made to the system so that you can share your work with other users."

https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/FreeBooks/TheInteractivePr...

    ~

Smalltalk can be written with MS Notepad, imported and incrementally compiled with fileIn, and run.

Using a designed for Smalltalk IDE will likely be more productive.