> these people need to roll up their sleeves and just learn the damn language

You really have no choice but to do that. But the critique here is that some languages make this hard. And some languages, like Python, appear deceptively simple and consistent, when they are anything but. And as I pointed out, these decisions were not really required or designed to solve certain problems. They just kind of came about in Python's development, one historically and intentionally ignorant of pre-existing languages and their good ideas.

When everybody just says "learn the language" or "there's list comprehensions" or "there's for loops", then why does the [...]*n syntax exist? What problems is it solving that require the confusion that it generates?