Some thoughts in no particular order:

1. FWIW, the older I get the larger a fraction of EWDs I disagree with.

2. If you take something wrong and reverse it you are usually left with something wrong.

3. Many of the language features that were cited as making lisp "elite" when I was a kid exist in Javascript. Lexical closures were treated like some mysterious thing that you need to study on a mountaintop and become enlightened to get are now used daily by workady front-end programmers.

4. Democratization isn't necessarily about deskilling, it's about making skills accessible to more people.

5. Having and celebrating those who are elite is good. "X is only for elites" is bad.

6. Literally nobody in my 3rd grade class had any issue programming in a dialect of lisp in the computer lab. Certainly some were better than others, but I wouldn't call something that even half the population can do as "for elites only"