It feels off to me because it feels like applying a technological fix (more complicated compilers!) to what is in essence a social problem. Of course tooling has an enormous weight in how people go about solving their programming problems; but the idea that we can fix the effects of e.g. underpricing technical debt or downward wage pressure on programmers simply by creating better tools (and better by which metric?) is -- in my experience -- a fool's errand.
He is, and his way of thinking, if you watch some of his talks seems to be: sometimes you have this problem, and sometimes that problem. How can we write a compiler that tackles both?
If you listen to Rich Hickey or Joe Armstrong you see something completely different. They ask what the biggest problems facing software developers are, and what philosophy should modern software development adopt in order to face these problems. The features of the languages they've designed directly follow from their philosophy.
I think it is no coincidence that Martin Odersky is a PL researcher (and hence is interested more in sophisticated compilers), while Hickey and Armstrong come "from the field".