I think this a very unfair comparison. Everyone who works with Python who understands its limitations has usually found reasonable workarounds for the things y

I think this a very unfair comparison. Everyone who works with Python who understands its limitations has usually found reasonable workarounds for the things you would expect the language to bend to, much like other, similar languages that occupy that niche. By the same token, we can claim that C++'s horrendous and undecidable syntax and footguns make it a language inadequate for "general purpose" programming; and for many cases you would be right! But there is no such thing as a language that can do everything well. The other big contender for "general purpose" is the JVM languages, which also suffer from innumerable issues such as slow VM startup time, long VM warmup, enormous RAM usage, lack of very reasonable primitives such as unsigned integers, etc. etc. Those are the reasons why very large systems either use a hybrid of languages and runtimes for different tasks, or use a monolythic solution and make the adequate compromises. No one will disagree that the multithreading story would be easier in Python if it chucked the GIL out of the way, but then again, if you're doing that you might as well start a project in Elixir, Julia, Rust, or any number of modern languages that don't suffer from the cruft, but easily will need a decade to catch up in terms of library support and tooling.