Comment by refulgentis

Here's some light to make it appear less stupid:

He doesn't claim its not a design failure.

He doesn't say they sat down and said "You know what? Lets do beautiful minimal syntax but have awful error messages & really bad compile times"

The light here is recursive. As you lay out, it is extremely s̶t̶u̶p̶i̶d̶ unlikely that choice was made, actively.

Left with an unlikely scenario, we take a step back and question if we have any assumptions: and our assumption is they made the choice actively.