To say that Swift is "nowhere near as simple" as Javascript or Kotlin is a very strange opinion to me, and I have experience with all 3.

Simple as in syntax, memory management, or in what regard? I can't think of a single example where Swift is not equivalent or better. Do you have the same criticism of Scala?

I do. Scala is insanely complicated once you inherit a codebase full of implicits and custom operators.

If misuse of a language feature is a criticism of the language, I have bad news about javascript.

Scala seems to encourage misuse :(

Swift has no traced garbage collector which means you cannot represent circular data structure/references. Also swift support for interfaces (protocol) is sub-par with today standards

> Also swift support for interfaces (protocol) is sub-par with today standards

interesting, what could be added/changed to make it better?

No support for default implementation methods. No support for generics in protocol.

There might be workarounds but for a newcomer, this is a red flag of reinventing a basic and universal construct (interfaces) in a sub-par one, this show a dangerous mentality from the swift vm devs, what else did they wrongfully reinvent in a sub-par way?

As the other commenter pointed out, default implementations (with genetic constraints!) are supported, they actually my favourite swift feature.

There is support for default implementation method in protocol for a while now.

Generics are supported through associated types.

I think considering swift as merely an evolution of obj-c is a drastic underestimation. Swift is a very nice language in its own right. Having spent time with most of the languages you've mentioned, while the learning curve might be a bit steeper, I think Swift is much easier to manage a medium or large project with than any of those options with the exception of maybe Kotlin, and personally I find some of the design choices a bit better in Swift than in Kotlin.