>Python seems to handle complexity better, but only on the surface. (Basically Python has nice data structures, great string formatting, and .. that's it.)

It's a complete scripting language, with tons of features, from a comprehensive standard library with something for most needs, to a packaging system, isolated environments, async io, and more. And lots of expressivity in structuring your program (including optional types).

So, not sure what the above "and that's it" means. That it's not Haskell? Yes, it's not.

>Setting up the Python environment requires something, because Python comes in many flavors (2 vs 3, system installed, user installed, /usr/local) and there are a bunch of factors (pip, pyenv, pipenv, PYTHONPATH, current directory with modules, requirement for python-dev headers, and GCC to compile native parts of packages, and then of course maybe extra shared libraries too) that can affect the "script".

If you're doing dev-ops with such scripts, you already need to handle the environment in general.