> they aren't (again, AFAIK) doing anything about it other than writing blog posts about how the language is mean to them, and filing bugs that compilers are mean to them.

There are people from that industry or adjacent industries writing other languages. Most obviously Jai (Jonathan Blow's language, Jonathan did "Braid" and "The Witness") but you could also argue for Ginger Bill's Odin. I suppose in this context it will be interesting to see whether the debug story is any better in these languages (neither is yet finished).