> the answer one doesn’t want to read is that the “language doesn’t matter”, at least not in any significant way.
When you have an outrageous amount of effort to (what amounts to manual) testing in closed environments before release, you're fighting the language but you just don't care.
> Empirically I would say that it does very very well on maintainability’s count
FAANG companies don't even release data related to how program defects are detected and addressed (publicly), so the assertion is literally baseless. Given enough time and effort, you can overcome the inability to do simple things. That doesn't make the tooling better, just the perception. This is common, historically, in tech (re Mechanical Turk).
Which is in line with the famous “No Silver Bullet” article.