I didn't see that thread. Based on my experience, I don't really buy the premise. I'm not saying different languages can't somewhat nudge you a tiny bit towards better practices. Or simply not allow you to do certain things, which isn't really sheparding is it? But the vast majority of great engineering I have seen is mostly about the team and the many decisions they have to make in the course of one day. Which quickly adds up.

Quality engineering mostly comes from people, not languages. It is about your own personal values, and then the values of the team you are on. If there were a magic bullet programming language that guided everyone away from poor code and it did not have tradeoffs like a hugely steep learning curve (hi Haskell) then you would see businesses quickly moving in that direction. Such a mythical language would offer a clear competitive advantage to any company who adopted it.

What you are looking at really is not good vs. bad, but tradeoffs. A language that allows you to take shortcuts and use hacks sounds like it could get you to your destination quicker sometimes. That's really valuable if your goal is to run many throw-away experiments before you land on a solution that is worth spending time on improving the code.