> these features are opt-in. If you don't want to use them, you don't have to.

Using a language is more than just writing it with a pre-established knowledge of what subset of features you think is worth the tradeoffs. More keywords/features means when you try to figure out how to do something new, there may be 15 different ways and you need to analyze and figure out which is the best one for this scenario, which ones are nonstarters, etc.

That's was more or less the whole design goal of Go. It was made by C++ programmers who were fed up with how many features were in the language, so they kept the feature set limited. Even the formatting is decided by the language. You may not agree with every decision, but what matters is decisions were made and they're standardized, so everyone is on the same page. You can read anyone else's code, and you know exactly what's going on.

besides it being almost impossible to understand what "the right way of doing stuff" is with Swift (or any bloated language), i absolutely _do_ have to use the keywords.

reading someone else's code is part of working with the language (as is understanding LLM output nowadays). i can't just make others not use the keywords i don't know/beed/like. especially if working within teams, or using OSS.

Fair point, I had not considered needing to read and understand code you didn't write yourself.

Especially in a corporate setting, not understanding a keyword you see in a PR could lead to bad code being checked in.