IME complexity is mostly a feature of intention and business logic and will usually creep in all the same, it just manifests as tons and tons of for loop spaghetti, duplication and code generation. You may not have to actually learn any "hard" language features, but instead you get a large amount of moving parts that can't be abstracted away cleanly and that you need to mentally track. I've just ported a relatively complex bit of business logic from Go to Scala and while the result is definitely not as "simple" in terms of language features used, it's a lot less code in a structure that I can actually keep in my head a lot more easily than reams upon reams of low-level imperative details that are kept consistent only by the implementer's self-discipline. Forcing code to be easily digestible by limiting the language feature set doesn't seem to work too well outside of a relatively limited space of straightforward applications.