> I just feel this (and its practical ramifications) are often overexaggerated.
I dunno. Can't fully agree or disagree. Nominally, yes, you really don't need s-expressions and homoiconicity for creating reflective, self-hosting runtimes - live redefinition is possible in Erlang, Pharo, Ruby. Metaprogramming ergonomics - sure they are cheap in Lisps, but even Lispers try to avoid reaching there, Clojure specifically recommends thinking twice, although projects like Hyperfiddle prove macros absolutely can be very powerful. Syntax, mathematical beauty, yada-yada - that's all "poetry", much of the real world operates on tons of very ugly yet functioning code, right? So, really Lisp-shmisp, whatever, no?
In practice though, Lispers are enormously pragmatic - I'm not self-referencing here, I have worked with some. It's incredible how rapidly they can build things, prototyping on the fly. How quickly they can move between different runtimes - I've seen codebases sharing ideas between absolutely dissimilar platforms. It is inspiring how undogmatic they could be - they easily move between modes - data/code, FP/OOP, interactive/compiled, etc. They have good understanding of type systems and some even know good deal of theorem provers. For whatever reasons, Lispers are conspicuously, disproportionately effective, and this is true. Sure "citation needed" here, but this is my empirical, anecdotal observation working in different groups, using distinct language stacks for many years.
The causation probably runs through the programmer, not the program. It's not like Lisp unequivocally emits good engineers, maybe it's that a substrate with minimal syntax and maximal malleability trains a particular disposition - they treat everything as reshapeable material, distrust dogma because the language never enforced one, reach for the smallest thing that works because the language makes "the smallest thing" actually small? Maybe Lisp doesn't make anyone write better programs, it just makes it cheap to keep changing your mind? Perhaps cross-runtime fluency, undogmatism, and rapid prototyping are all just "cheap to change your mind" in a way?
Could be selection bias - maybe Lisp just attracts curious, theory-literate, undogmatic people? I don't know. What I observed is for whatever reason Lisp typically attracts older, more experienced engineers. And therefore all the "Lisp propaganda" comes from them, and demographically that's a small subset of overall community and maybe that why it often feels like overexaggerated rhetoric?