The idea of using a subset of an existing popular language is very wise IMHO. We can (and apparently are) debating the merits of the language runtime, but what a subset gives you is immediate access to a large pile of existing tooling that you'd have to write yourself, eg linters, formatters, lsps, etc. Stuff that is purely source-oriented.
That hadn't really occurred to me before.
That seems like a smart insight... but, if you're going to use an existing linter it will lint the full existing language and not your subset.
So, if you accidentally code something that is not in the subset but is in the full language, the linter would then happily accept that. Imo there will be similar issues for lsps and formatters also. You're going to probably end up in a situation where you have to fork all of those anyway.