That's a great essay--thanks.
And you have a good point. Maybe it's a weakness in the metaphor if one can see it either way.
I fundamentally believe that there is no perfect language, instead one merely chooses a set of trade-offs. What's interesting about Lisp is that it is simultaneously well-respected and yet not widely used in productions (compared to C, C++, Python, JavaScript, and even Rust).
It's almost like Lisp chose a particularly extreme set of trade-offs that yield great power but also repel large swathes of programmers. I think PG might say that it repels dumb programmers, but maybe not.
Our entire profession has been moving more and more in the "bondage-and-discipline" direction over the past 10 years or so, tracking with broader sociological trends that are also justified with arguments involving "safety". That by itself can explain why Lisp has such low adoption. While Lisp has never been the most-popular language, it was never as unpopular as it is today. If that pendulum swings the other way, Lisp will get more popular again.
I think it’s just that the syntax is more difficult to grok. When I first saw code (PHP and JS) it was fairly easy to read and figure out what was going on. I’m now experienced but I’ve never tried Lisp, but reading Lisp code takes considerably more effort than when I first saw the PHP/JS. I’m sure with very little experience it becomes just as easy, but to the novel eye I think it’s simply less intuitive to reason about.