rather strongly typed Java.

[In Java] you can also violate many of the type rules whenever you want or need to

Okay. Well maybe being able to not spell out types every single time would also count as not burdening the programmer ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I bought Clean Code when I started learning programming, some of it was useful, but now I understand that it was too opinionated for a beginner

Edit: also

Whose job is it to manage that risk? Is it the language’s job? Or is it the programmer’s job[?]

It is language's job to enforce risk management wherever possible, humans are demonstrated time and time again to be poor at risk management (same for the other questions like 'whose job it is to check for nulls'

Edit2:

Defects are the fault of programmers. It is programmers who create defects

… and that is why he proposes to not help programmers with language means. I never thought that views of how problems should be tackled might differ so much while having in mind the same reasons and goals.

Albeit I do agree that one must write tests, even if language helps, not everything can reasonably be automatically checked