The point I’m trying to make is that this is a very incomplete article, as it doesn’t seem that much thought was put on the downsides.

I could mentioned additional points in favor for the same reason you mentioned your points against, but at some point one has to stop and decide whether any minor, additional points made would sway the overall verdict.

Many of the most popular languages have both modifiers and annotations:

I have a separate blog post in which I consider when "popularity" or "familiarity" should be considered when it comes to language design.

C doesn’t have both because it doesn’t even have annotations. Idk about C++, but it either doesn’t have annotations (like C)

Both C and C++ have annotations. They are called "attributes" in their language, as mentioned in the footnote linked from the blog post's first sentence.

People genuinely don’t believe this to be an issue. The closest is public static int main() for java.

If you look at Java-inspired languages like Scala or Kotlin, neither of them have public (made the default) nor static (replaced by companion objects).