I would be interested in serious attempts to argue for this, even if they can't reasonably be backed up by data.

For example, I think there's a pretty strong argument that immutability makes it easier to write multithreaded code (perhaps at some performance cost), because it entirely prevents common types of bugs.

Similarly there's a good argument that making methods open to extension (like Kotlin or Julia) makes it easier for an ecosystem to adopt unified APIs without explicit coordination.

There's obviously a very strong argument that Garbage Collection prevents a lot of memory safety bugs, at costs to interoperability and performance.