I don't buy this at all. I think it's path dependent. The language differences aren't big enough to dominate over ecosystems and libraries. Ease of integration with C can make a bigger difference than significant whitespace. Etc.
Personally I think Python is an exceptionally ugly language for one as popular as it is (the magical underscore identifiers really bug me, and I think list comprehensions are deeply inferior to monadic chaining - there's a reason nobody copies them but everyone got LINQ envy). But it's clear from a perusal of code in the areas where Python dominates, data science and machine learning, that aesthetics are very far from people's minds. They'd be using Javascript if it had the libraries available.
Personally I think Python is an exceptionally ugly language for one as popular as it is (the magical underscore identifiers really bug me, and I think list comprehensions are deeply inferior to monadic chaining - there's a reason nobody copies them but everyone got LINQ envy). But it's clear from a perusal of code in the areas where Python dominates, data science and machine learning, that aesthetics are very far from people's minds. They'd be using Javascript if it had the libraries available.