I don't buy this at all. I think it's path dependent. The language differences aren't big enough to dominate over ecosystems and libraries. Ease of integration with C can make a bigger difference than significant whitespace. Etc.

Personally I think Python is an exceptionally ugly language for one as popular as it is (the magical underscore identifiers really bug me, and I think list comprehensions are deeply inferior to monadic chaining - there's a reason nobody copies them but everyone got LINQ envy). But it's clear from a perusal of code in the areas where Python dominates, data science, that aesthetics are very far from people's minds. They'd be using Javascript if it had the libraries available.