I think your experience is entirely accurate - docs & error messages are the biggest problems julia has right now, but unfortunately I don’t see a lot of momentum happening in that direction. A lot of people seem to know that this is bad, but either willfully ignore it or efforts to make it better stall. We really could do with a Quality Of Life release that just improves on this, without adding big new features for once, like all releases since 1.0 have.
One thing I disagree with is Debian’ BenchmarksGame being a good or representative benchmark of a language’s performance - the benchmark is notorious for having some pretty arbitrary restrictions on what is and is not allowed for some subset of languages, while others can do pretty much whatever they want to squeeze out every ounce of performance possible.