> that criticism is usually posited by users of the language.

Uhhh, no. Sure, it's posited by people who feel they are are forced to use it, but it's basically unlearning other syntax.

Here's a study about people with no experience. They do better with python:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262256894_An_Empiri...

When the scala language made whitespace optional, it was very divisive, but now it's extremely well accepted.

At a former workplace where most stuff was done in PHP, some colleagues used whitespace very liberally. Like, indentation was just a random amount of whitespace, every line slightly different. Sometimes 2 or more spaces between keywords, etc.

After that experience Python code is like eye-bleach to me.

I meant users of languages ( application programmers) as opposed to compiler programmers, not python programmers specifically, so I'm including devs that use other languages and see in python a tool that they would consume.