It's not about the features it's about priorities. In principal as you say you can just ignore the bits you don't use, but there are still some glaring holes like variadic generics which didn't get attention presumably because the core team was focused on SwiftUI.

And due to the governance of the language, the "community" priorities will always take a back seat to Apple's product priorities, so it feels a bit funny to invest too heavily in the language for that reason alone.