@espen_espelund good question - here my take! A major difference is that the vision of Meltano is larger than just EL, that’s where the DataOps OS naming comes from. Meltano’s goal is to make installing, configuring, and running data tools together easier. At this Data OS layer were able to bring all the tools in the stack together to work in harmony while also giving teams the tools to implement good software engineering practices (isolated environments, CI, testing, code reviews, etc.) for their data stack.
Check out
https://gitlab.com/meltano/squared that’s our own data platform built using Meltano with plugins like Singer/dbt/Airflow/Superset/Great Expectations/Permifrost/aws cli/ etc. And before I started working at Meltano (the company) I personally ran Meltano (the software) at a large enterprise with success! We implemented it years ago so we were only using it for EL (and reverse ETL) though.