Some of the issues linked are JuliaStats issues, and there's a lot happening to improve it, which should become more visible over the next few months. Example: https://discourse.julialang.org/t/pushing-julia-statistics-d...
Julia really pushes on language and compiler design in ways many statically typed languages do not. There is real wok to be done at the frontiers, and also investment in tooling built on top of that. It is all happening. The package ecosystem takes time to mature - Julia has a deliberate release process, the key packages have adopted a more deliberate release process, but stuff out in the long tail naturally tends to move fast - as it should.
I share your sense that "something is just missing in Julia" but I maybe disagree with the author in that I see it as potentially changeable or something, as not hopeless.
Julia has grown tremendously in a short period of time, both in the language, its implementation, and the size of the community. So in that sense I see it as inevitable there's going to be a lot of bugs and chaos for a bit.
On the other hand, I've always felt a bit of unease that a numerical language was being developed from the ground up as that, without it being an offshoot of more general purpose language. It's not that I think there's something inherently wrong with it, but I do think that having a greater variety of perspectives looking at it are more likely to catch things early.
I don't think in this regard it's a function of academia -- although it certainly could be -- it's more a function of having a very narrow community looking at the language. Regardless of how smart they all are, I think having a broader range of perspectives might catch things earlier.
In this regard, I might have preferred the Julia fervor and effort be put into some numerical Nim libraries, or a numerical "abstracted subset of Rust" or something. It's not so much I dislike Julia as much as it is I'd feel safer with a more generalist perspective on basic language design.
But who knows. To me it's a bit ironic the author focuses on Python as an alternative, because it's not like that is free from problems, and Python has been around for a lot longer. They might be different problems, but they're not absent. Python is a bit ironic too in that it has been sort of kludged together over time into what it is today, for better or worse. I guess it feels like to me all the major numerical programming platforms have this kind of kludgy feeling in different ways; Julia feels/felt a bit like an opportunity for a clean break, if nothing else.
For what it's worth, I prefer 1-based indexing.
My guess is a lot of what's in the post is probably tied to growing pains and maybe butterfly effects of novel language features on bigger-picture patterns. It would be interesting to see where things were at at a similar stage in other languages.
There are many great qualities of Julia, and I've wanted to love it and use it in production. However, coming from the tooling and correctness of Rust leaves me thinking something is just missing in Julia. One of the links in the post references "cowboy" culture. While I don't think this is the correct nomenclature, there is a sense with looking at the package ecosystem and even Julia itself that makes me think of the pressure in academia to publish constantly. I'm not sure what to make of that, and it's simply a feeling.