These are not straw man arguments. I have actually dealt with all three of these examples in my career. The python one is particularly relevant to me, but I’ve had push back on running our API over HTTPS “because if they want to hack you they will anyway so why pay the extra cost”.
Not three, four. No idea about Python text, I don't know what the https fuss is about either. But the other two things are not how I've seen them discussed, and I've seen them many times.
I'm in favor of GCs and guards. What I'm against is that some languages removed the option to manage memory manually when it makes sense and disabling guards once the code is debugged. Those were the terms and, in that context, the objections make sense: there are cases when it's important to know in advance that the GC'd won't get in the way.
Java was the start of all that crap, with all sort of restrictions: every function must be a method, you can't precompile, no pointers, everything GC'd...
