That criticism doesn't make sense if one syntax is completely identical to another in terms of the underlying semantics. Different syntax, same language.
I’m always sharing diffs of code, screenshots, browsing code snippets online etc. Unless every single one of these tools also allows me to configure the way the AST is rendered then this approach adds a lot of confusion for not much benefit.
The actual representation of code is just as important as the AST in many cases. If it wasn’t then we would all just code in lisp.
This is probably a fiction for any reasonably complex language. Being able to view a C program in S-expression form doesn't solve any real open problems in software engineering, but it certainly creates some new ones.
