Syntax is so much less important that semantics that it isn’t even really worth talking about in my opinion

Readability (in the sense of "How fast can the average developer parse code in the given language?") and proneness to errors are a thing, though.

Consider, e.g., how in TypeScript object literals ({ a: b, c: d, e }), object types ({ a: b; c: d; }) and object destructuring ({ a, c, e } = … ) can all look very similar. Same thing for lambdas ((a: b) => b) and function types ((a: b) => b). Also, additional parentheses are needed to prevent the compiler from mistaking an object literal ({ … }) for a function body ({ … }) when it is returned in a lambda expression. In short: Some of TypeScript's syntactic constructs are heavily overloaded and their meaning depends on the context.

For an example of proneness to errors, consider that in Nix function calls (<function name> <param1> <param2> …) and lists ([<item1> <item 2> …]) look almost the same and it's very easy to confuse the two and mess up, e.g.

``` let foo = [ item1 myFunction "arg1" "arg2" item3 ] ```

defines a list with 5 items, not 3, due to missing parentheses around the function call.