I think the meme come from the fact that in 00s and early 10s most people looked at Python code coming from C++ and Java.

In Java bad OOP conventions were commonplace, like everything using getters/setters, deeply nested class hierarchies and insane patterns like AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean. It got impossible to figure out what's going on.

C++ just got every possible feature that badly interacts with each other, in an amount that never could fit in a single person's context window. That basically led to a situation where every programmer or company had it's own dialect of the language; the other dialects than your own were mostly incomprehensive.

Python has it's own share of bad features, and for a long time really bad ecosystem around the language - Python 2 vs Python 3; eggs vs wheels; easy_install vs pip; 123489 ways of installing Python and each of them bad. But, once it started to become better, in the mid-late 10s, around Python 3.5 or 3.6, it exploded in popularity.