Just fine, you say? I had dozens of colleagues being in medium to large Python projects and every single one of them was terrified of every small change in the projects because inevitably something fails in an unexpected way.

These guys and girls are heroes. They are like the plumbers and electricians working at 3:00 AM so your water and electricity never stop while you're awake.

"Just fine" is likely only your external observation. I'd give them medals and help them retire at 35 for all the horrors they have endured. It's "just fine" because they tirelessly made sure of it.

Things were just fine despite Python. Not because of Python.

Plus, none of us has statistics that prove a theory beyond any doubt. Forget about that; this scarcely (if ever) existed in the programming world and likely will not exist anytime soon. We should apply our experience and the intuition that grows out of it.

Finally: a pile of anecdotal evidence can be treated as an objective evidence with, say, 50-60% probability. Insisting that the real world must comply with academically pure practices is not going to get us anywhere (and is misguided).

Survivorship bias. You don't hear about the failures. Moreover, many of those things (e.g., lots of Python at Google) was written at a time when there weren't better options, so you weren't struggling to make Python work while your competitor is writing Go or TypeScript.

Those projects were started when python was the least bad choice and grew out quickly enough that they could hire legions of developers to work around pythons problems.