I think that's a big part of it. I'm writing servers and systems in C++ and Kotlin. C++ is a very dense language, virtually every token is semantic with little redundancy except the archaic header declaration system, so there are not all that many shortcuts that still preserve my intended meaning. Kotlin feels like a response to Java being so low-density, and is much higher density, although not as much as C++.

Every time I play with web or GUI development I get the impression that the languages and systems are misaligned with the way people express their intentions in the space. It makes me want to develop a language (or family of languages) directly for expressing GUI concepts, but I don't understand the space well enough to do a good job.