🔗 Choosing a language based on its syntax?

I am still perplexed by how people judge a language purely by its declaration syntax, and will decide whether to use the language purely based on whether they like that aspect or not.

The general categories of declarations can be classified as the following:

• type name = value—type-focused
• name: type = value—name-focused
• var name type = value—qualifier-focused

When designing a language, if your semantics are pretty clear you can trivially change this declaration syntax and the semantics of the language will be mostly the same (if not identical). People seriously think the declaration syntax is what gives a language its “character”. I do not get this train of thought in the slightest
I probably do have a bias, in that I know how compilers work, but even when I didn’t understand, I chose languages based on my need, not on whether they “looked good.”