It's such an insightful phrase.
In general, people are afraid of simplicity. When you show them a technique or programming language or method or perspective or whatever that is new to them but also simplified the problem, people are inherently bothered that it isn’t as complex as they’re used to, which convinces them that it isn’t a valid solution.
I'm not surprised, it is very difficult to scale Python to larger teams and projects. I mean people have done it to some degree, but at what cost?
It's much better to stick with a static language like Java or C#. You mentioned pattern matching and discriminated unions at the end of your post, which Java has recently gained, and C# to an extent as well.
Its value decreases swiftly the less glue you require, since that is its real niche.
But mainstream languages also include C++, C#, Go and many others. It's a good thing to have several different tools in your toolbox, but a few tools can cover pretty much any scenario outside of really extreme corner cases (where something like e.g. Prolog might be of use).
I'm perfectly happy letting other people work in the middle of the bell curve, but I cry a little inside when I see a super cool application be ruined by highly conservative software thinking. I have never been able to understand that, usually hardware-oriented, companies will be doing something super advanced and novel with physics, engineering, biology, and other "hardware" related things, but then will bury their heads in the sand unless the most common denominator programming language is used because they supposedly can't hire people otherwise. But yet they're perfectly willing to hire and train people on the novel hardware designs. It doesn't add up.
There is a very strange uncomfortability with software ideas that are new to people that I do not see when it comes to even the most novel and cutting-edge hardware-related topics. I have experienced this in internal talks, where hardware-related talks will generate a huge amount of buzz and questions, despite often being well beyond the audience, and the software-oriented talks seem to attract crickets. Honestly, I think it's a bit of hidden hubris, in that many scientists and engineers consider themselves to understand software, and in showing interest in new software-related things, they fear showcasing that they don't know something they fancy themselves as knowing. The other possible answer is that people are just afraid of software in some sense.
I found this in a recent interview where it seemed to be expected to solve a problem using objects and either interfaces or inheritance. I solved the problem with discriminated unions and pattern matching, and there seemed to be some uncomfortability with the solution because it wasn't what they were used to as being the "right answer", when in reality it was just another spot in the solution space of the expression problem.