It's a pleasant and practical language to write, yet fairly safe.

Imagine the safety of Rust but looking more like Python (or Haskell...), the concurrency of Go (since V5), and without a borrow checker (but a GC instead).

I watch some intro to OCAML videos, got excited about the languages features, then tried reading some real OCAML (Tezos, which was touted as the star of idiomatic OCAML projects - can't find the site that listed it now), and I found it so incredibly dense, hard to read, and almost completely devoid of meaningful naming and comments. It felt similar to reverse-engineering minified code to me.

sounds like unfamiliarity. OCaml isn't a language a layman can read without prerequisites.

I found the idea pleasant, but not in actuality. So maybe it's an acquired taste? Haha

oh it definitely is. A lot of Haskell can look like you describe, but it's perfectly legible if you have enough reps under your belt. I find normal languages hard to read nowadays.