The "Swift has too many keywords now" meme makes me want to go insane. The vast majority of Swift code never runs into any of that stuff; so, what advocates of it are saying is in effect "we don't want Swift to expand into these new areas (that it has potential to be really good at) even if it's in a way that doesn't affect current uses at all."

That said, the Swift 6 / Strict Concurrency transitions truly have been rough and confusing. It's not super clear to me that much of it could have been avoided (maybe if the value of Approachable Concurrency mode had been understood to be important from the beginning?), and the benefits are real, but my gut feeling is that a lot of the "Swift is too complicated" stuff is probably just misplaced annoyance at this.

Swift's concurrency story is what happens when a multi-year project meets Apple's fixed six month Swift release timeline. And being written by highly knowledgeable but low level engineers who've never written an iOS app in their life, means that there was a huge approachability hole they've only recently worked their way out of, but even that has major issues (MainActor default on in Xcode but not Swift itself).