Also, I found that its static analysis tooling (eg LSP server) was really slow. Compiling small programs was also rather slow, and it generated large binaries.

I also had some difficulty understanding the documentation related to importing and including modules and classes; it seemed written from a perspective assuming that the reader already knows Ruby, which I do not.

At the time, I was also curious about Common Lisp and Nim, so I spent a bunch of time learning the former, and have lately been writing small personal scripts/tools using the latter.

My experience using Python for backend web development has been mixed. If I had to do work like that professionally in the future, I would be happy to do it in a language like Crystal. It seems a lot more comfortable to me than Go, less intimidating than a JVM language (Kotlin?), and less "weird" than Common Lisp or a functional language like OCaml.

It doesn't seem like a bad choice for a company willing to invest in engineers while they learn the language, and maybe invest in writing some of their own libraries while the ecosystem is still young. I felt like I was able to get productive fairly quickly.

I think an interesting project would be to write a fairly simple web server (maybe some basic REST CRUD thing using idiomatic code) in several languages and frameworks, and compare their performance, ease of getting started, and complexity of the code. I had started working on this myself at one point, and it seems like it could be worthwhile to pick up again, especially now that all of the language ecosystems I had in mind have matured a little bit.