I think it gets the reputation because even though it has a relatively limited number of constructs, they're all almost always in play. And they're almost all s

I think it gets the reputation because even though it has a relatively limited number of constructs, they're all almost always in play. And they're almost all so basic that you'll actually encounter them on a regular basis, and often in novel use cases. So there's a certain combinatorial complexity that doesn't exist in languages that actually have more syntactic forms.