I've been coding around 25 years and got my start in perl. I absolutely hated python when I first used it. I use it all the time now. I still prefer my curly braces but I don't have any trouble with python or mind the whitespace anymore. I just run it through ruff every save. I do the same with go everything goes through gofumpt. I really think a lot of it is a generational thing. Older people are just used to curly brackets.

I do get peoples complaints about the packaging. Unless you're a dev already it's a bit extra to deal with shuffling virtual environments because the system python environments almost never work out of the box, at least in the last few distros I've used. Once I adjusted though it's no problem. I run half my dev stuff in toolboxes with their own environment anyway.