What you were referring to is a talk by a core developer at JuliaCon 2019 titled 'The unreasonable effectiveness of multiple dispatch' [1], which has less of a fanboy-vibe imho.
Edit: Oh. I didn't notice the arstechnica article had this exact title. That's a bit cheap...
Julia is a delightful combination of ease of use, clarity, and performance. It lets one concentrate much more on the problem at hand than language related boilerplate (I’m looking at you, Rust).
I’m hopeful that Julia will become one of the most used general purpose programming languages in the long run. It’s certainly got what it takes!
The "unreasonable effectiveness" article wasn't, to my knowledge, by a community member. It's normal for magazines to have enthusiastic headlines.
You're making a lot of assumptions here that aren't very kind or well supported.
>But what we will see in this example is that Julia does not always act like other scripting languages. There are some "lunches lost" that we will have to understand. Understanding how this design decision effects the way you must code is crucial to producing efficient Julia code.
This is more about how the compilation process is working to both help people understand how to write optimal code and to understand what optimizing compilers need in order to work. The engineering trade-offs, like slow performance of globals, errors in functions that would change types, etc. are all demonstrated. If you read a full description of the engineering trade-offs and think that it's a marketing tool, then you must think it made the right trade-offs? I don't understand why that would be bad.