Or maybe it is easy to find fault with programming languages you actually use and to idealize programming languages you don't use.

I imagine a world where Common LISP won and reddit/programming would be kvetching all the details CL got wrong while asking "How can I get a COBOL Job?", "Did you know that PHP syntax is based on Chomsky's generative grammar?"

I worked on a project that involved building a stream processing engine in Scala that heavily used Monads.

I remember being told by the manager what the error handling strategy was and thinking "This is like that Amway presentation where they 'draw circles' showing how 8 people get a cut of the $7 tube of toothpaste they sell you and then ask 'How can we beat the prices in the supermarket?', they strike the presentation board with a pointer and say 'By eliminating the middleman!'"

Now, they could have handled errors correctly with monads just as they could have handled errors correctly with exceptions, except that they didn't. That manager approved code review after code review where error handling was absent.