Very true.
Personally I quite like the ML-style syntax, speak Haskell, Elm, and the like. At the same time I’m not really fond of the C++ style syntax with deeply nested :: namespaces with lots of shortened names, like std or Buf (seriously, you couldn’t call if Buffer)?
But the latter also applies to Rust and I cannot deny that Rust is a very thoughtfully designed language with a lot of merits (I’m actually learning it at the moment).
So yeah, as I see it good language design is nearly orthogonal to choice of syntax.