Your last sentence makes a very good point. And Uncle Bob's tool is to have loads of tests.

I suppose it's all just a balance: simplicity versus expressiveness, foot guns versus inflexibility, conciseness versus ceremony, dev velocity versus performance in production.

I'm okay with shifting some of the burden of common errors from developer into the language if that improves reliability or maintainability. But Martin has a point in that no guard rails can ever prevent all bugs and it can be annoying if languages force lots of new ceremony that seems meaningless.