Even accepting it as a dynamic language that is predominantly imperative, it still has many surprising characteristics. The scoping, binding/assignment are conflated, no built-in records, limited lambdas, pervasive mutability and null/None, etc.

I accept that it's a huge improvement over many mainstream languages (certainly bash!), but I find e.g. OCaml/F#/ML code far easier to reason about. These languages are also hybrid imperative and so there is no need to use monads, they can be used just like Python.