GDScript integrates so nicely with the Node/Resource refcount model. It fills the same niche that Unreal's Blueprints do, which is great! When you've found something performance-critical, it's not difficult to convert a GDScript node into a GDNative one.
I feel like a lot of the "GDScript, ick!" comments tend to assume that the scripting language is trying to be Lua/C#/Python tacked onto a C++ codebase. It's a lot more tightly-integrated with the runtime, and it makes organizing things a lot better in the long run.