More than the design of the language itself, the culture suffered (and still suffers to a lesser degree) from the legacy of those bad designs, such that if you

More than the design of the language itself, the culture suffered (and still suffers to a lesser degree) from the legacy of those bad designs, such that if you wanted to avoid a whole ton of awful codebases, poor practices and mediocre developers you could have easily done so by putting a language barrier between you and them and "graduating" to some other language. Many teams and codebases these days have moved onwards and upwards toward a world where sensible design exists.