> Personally I find it much more likely that I'll have to bend over backwards when I'm dealing with a DSL rather than just plain code

I think this is cherrypicking at generalities. It's just as easy to run into a wall with "regular code" because some API doesn't provide what you need. Conversely, DSLs often have escape hatches (e.g. https://www.smarty.net/docsv2/en/language.function.php.tpl)

DSLs are useful sometimes. Heck, the entire web is built on top of DSLs: HTML, CSS, SQL, even JSX. I agree that there are valid criticisms to be made about specific implementations of specific DSLs, but I don't agree that those criticisms are generalizable to the concept of DSLs as a tool in a framework designer's arsenal.