It assigns linguistic gender, which isn't the same as people's gender.

Yes, I thought so. Isn't that unnecessary overhead? I think this disqualifies Spanish and other languages like it.

To me, it doesn't matter much, because there isn't much "extra" to learn. The gender is derived from the word suffix, and there are three or four rules to that, so it's both extremely easy to learn and to apply to unknown words.

This is unlike, say, German, where each word has a random gender and you need to learn it along with the word. There, I agree, that's unnecessary overhead.