The reason for the popularity of python is mainly due to advertising it to programming newbies and non-programmers, not due to significant whitespace.

I never brought popularity up: that mostly leads to lots of small snippets but not a big amount of working code. You can have an unpopular language with a few productive actors producing lots of code.

I argue that "chronic inconvenience" is disproven by so many working programs. Even if one argues it's an inconvenience, it is a minor one or it would be hard for non-newbies to produce so much with Python.

It’s a minor inconvenience, sure, I use python myself, but it’s definitely a chronic one. It annoys me every single time I code in python.