That's a deficiency of the iOS platform, not the ObjC language. It's just that ObjC is brittle and tricky enough that there's no longer much reason to learn it

That's a deficiency of the iOS platform, not the ObjC language. It's just that ObjC is brittle and tricky enough that there's no longer much reason to learn it unless you're working on iOS (or possibly MacOS, if you think that'll stay relevant), though GNUstep is portable if you really want to.