This only applies to Smalltalk-72 (which is celebrated this year). The Smalltalk we know today started with Smalltalk-76; like Simula or Java it has inheritance and compiled virtual methods (i.e. no longer passing tokens to objects for interpretation). Smalltalk-80 celebrated its 40 years in 2020 on which occasion I implemented a couple of tools and VMs to study its inner workings, see https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk.
> a consistent model, and minimal syntax
Which is mostly beneficial for the parser writer; implementing an efficient VM for Smalltalk is still an art today, because nearly everything is a closure and the control flow has to be guessed; in any case Smalltalk can at least pride itself on having initiated a development that led e.g. to Java Hotspot and the V8 engine.