Intellectuals are no different from anyone else - they live in the same reality and must be judged by their results. I don't think anyone would disagree that PL theory, as a body of work, has produced a set of languages whose penetration in the real world is oddly small both given (a) the investment in these technologies, and (b) the many real advantages of typed higher-order programming.
As a general pattern, usually when I see this outcome explained, it takes the form of blaming the user. We wouldn't let anyone else get away with this excuse, so why should intellectuals be treated as a privileged class?
To be anti-intellectual is to judge intellectuals more harshly than they deserve. To be pro-intellectual, also a cognitive bias, is to judge them more leniently than they deserve. In a world whose bias is generally pro-intellectual, it's easy for a neutral assessment to seem relatively anti-intellectual, but perhaps what you are perceiving is not an exceptional bias but the absence of a systemic bias which you've grown used to.