As someone who has been using Java for enterprise software for over 25 years, but who likes to program his pet projects in Python, let me give you another reason:

3. Python has a very fast feedback loop. You type, run and see the result immediately. This is great for small projects and prototypes. Java needs much more work, not just for the compiling but it also needs more boilerplate. This is fine for enterprise projects which typically are very large and prefer stability over speed of development. But at home I don't have the time or the patience for that.

I'm very into tight cadence and have a lot of options to choose from, doing most of my "pets" in Racket, Elixir, Picolisp and p5js, but I still sometimes generate a Maven project and start hacking in a unit test because libraries and performance are excellent and sometimes it requires less effort to brute a problem with imperative mutations.

Pharo is an alternative but documentation and libraries just aren't as good, and maybe never will be.