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But a language's syntax is something you interface with literally every single time you're using it.

Why would (even simple) aesthetic choices in syntax not matter, if they're such a big part of the experience?

While you do interface with it all the time, it's not something you'll be thinking all the time, at some point it will be completely invisible even though it's there (unless you're that bored). What will really be a big part of the experience is what offers actual resistance to solving your problem and actively waste brain power and not muscle memory, be it the fact that language semantics forces you to write the same thing all the time when a particular feature (like macros) could handle it trivially, the lack of some particular type safety makes it so you keep losing time debugging the same error, the interactive tools being lacking forcing you to waste time debugging with prints, you have a workflow where the JIT lag keeps breaking your pace, the community doesn't have a culture of documentation making it so you'll lose time trying to decode the source, etc...

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