I would argue that those things don't even need to be there or so complex, which is why it's weird Python is considered a good beginner's language. It is Python

I would argue that those things don't even need to be there or so complex, which is why it's weird Python is considered a good beginner's language. It is Python that makes these things complex, not the things themselves. The GIL shouldn't be there in the sense of async and concurrency code being understandable and actually concurrent. The scoping rules should absolutely be explainable to beginners. Decorators are just weird tacked on things. Maybe async is a non-beginners topic, but one can introduce it pretty easily in languages like F# or Elixir or even LabVIEW, so I'm not sure. Plenty of languages make it very easy to read data from a file, process it, and then write it back out. F#, Elixir, Racket, LabVIEW, etc. all come to mind.