Java would be Coke to C#'s Pepsi

I don't agree at all that it's a coke/pepsi situation. That analogy is for when two mostly-interchangeable choices develop tribal followings based largely on personal preference. Coke and Pepsi are both caramel carbonated soft drinks that are terrible for your health differing only slightly in flavour. Otherwise they're materially identical.

C# is strongly/statically typed, compiled, and quite fast (after the vm has started), whereas python is weakly/dynamically typed, interpreted, and generally slow as fuck. Those are two fundamentally different languages, how could it possibly be a coke/pepsi situation?

I think python is fantastic for certain use cases: gluing other tools together (like LAPACK or other ancient libraries), system automation, prototyping, exploitation (I think pretty much all of us were working on stealmybitcoin in python), and exploratory data analysis.

The problems arise when people try to write, say, gigantic GUI applications in python, or really anything with CPU-bound workloads. Part of being an engineer is using the right tool for the right job. Python is the wrong tool for lots of jobs. That shouldn't be a controversial statement.