I feel the opposite—the typing ergonomics are better with a lower-punctuation language, but the reading ergonomics are substantially worse.

Punctuation is used in written human languages to provide assistance to our brain-parsers—like road signs that help navigate a sentence. Too much punctuation and it becomes a huge problem because it ceases to be meaningful, but have you ever tried reading a Roman inscription written with no spaces or sentence boundaries?

I think programming language punctuation serves the same role—it visually marks out how the parser is going to navigate the code, allowing the reader to use less mental effort repursing code that they initially misparsed. ML-style languages have a simpler syntax than the C family, which means there is some justification for having less assistive punctuation, but I've definitely struggled to navigate OCaml as a result of too little punctuation.