The problem is not fear, the problem is unfamiliarity and cost. If US company decided that all company communications from now on would be in Mandarin, it would be a mistake - not because Mandarin is particularly bad or frightening, but because most people in US would not know how to speak Mandarin and thus would not be able to participate in communication without very substantial effort.

Code is a form of communication too, and it must be done in a way that is understandable to fellow developers, otherwise costs of development raise immensely and the whole project comes under threat.

A lot of engineering (as opposed to computer science) is about eliminating strangeness and minimizing risk.

Probably because those areas of engineering are about making things that work.

Bosses understandably want to commoditize programmers.

Speaking of "strange tools", Rich Hickey mentioned the phenomenon of helping commoditize yourself by shying away from the unfamiliar (in Simple Made Easy).

Everybody wants to commoditize programmers. Commoditizing is how you build mass production, mass production is how you get cheap accessible goods, cheap accessible good is how you keep 7 bln people fed and reasonable comfortable. I get it that for a professional programmer the threat to his priesthood status is unpleasant, but it's where it is going, and it is inevitable.