I've been on both sides of the fence here - I've bounced between two camps:

1. Go with a better type system. A compiled language, that has sum types, no-nil, and generics.

2. A widely used, production, systems language that implements PL-theory up until the year ~2000. (Effects, as described in this article, was a research topic in 1999).

I started with (1), but as I started to get more and more exposed to (2), you start looking back on times when you fought with the type system and how some of these PL-nerds have a point. I think my first foray into Higher-Kinded Types was trying to rewrite a dynamic python dispatch system into Rust while keeping types at compile time.

The problem is, many of these PL-nerd concepts are rare and kind of hard to grok at first, and I can easily see them scaring people off from the language. However I think once you understand how they work, and the PL-nerds dumb down the language, I think most people will come around to them. Concepts like "sum types" and "monads", are IMO easy to understand concepts with dumb names, and even more complex standard definitions.