it's not the rationale that's important, it's the particular things that are incentivized that's important. I'd certainly argue that Python incentivizes a better set of practices than does Java, despite the fact that they each incentivize things.

Furthermore, language design by its very nature involves incentivizing some things and disincentivizing others. What this blog post is truly claiming, IMHO, is that Python did it willfully and well, whereas many other languages grew by accretion and without intentional thought as to what they were incentivizing.

So don't judge Python because it intentionally incentivizes some behaviors at the cost of others - every language does that - judge the things it incentivizes.