You think lisp is "weird and sinister or ghostly" and that 'we' are still wrestling with something 66 years later?
This sounds more like someone getting caught up in the pageantry of a niche that pragmatic people have left behind a long time ago. Lisp was very influential, but those advancement have made their way into practical languages and lisp has been impractical for many decades at this point.
Scheme has pioneered a lot of stuff over the last 30-40 years that is still fresh for most of the PL world, hygienic macros (like Rust is trying to implement), delimited continuations (which underlies Java's new virtual threads, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vupFNsND6o), efficient closure representations (used all over the place since everybody got lambda fever). Into formal verification? Scheme was there in 1995 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/VLISP%3A-A-verified-im...
And there is at least half a dozen things in Racket that I wish mainstream languages could get their ass in gear and copy, but no such luck.
Insert meme of Nolan Grayson, representing Lisp/Scheme/Racket programmers, pointing at fighter jets labeled "transpilers" and saying: "Look at what they need to mimic just a fraction of our power!"
I think the roles would be reversed when trying to make fast, small interactive software that people want to use. "Powerful" is interesting but clear, straightforward and fast is better. No web browser, database, video codec, or high end video game is written in scheme. At best it's inefficient ancillary software that someone wrote in scheme because they wanted to, not because that's what a user wanted.
A language that contains all Lisp features becomes identifiable as a member of the Lisp family, and is then removed from the discussion of languages that don't have all Lisp features.
Ah yes, all of the modern practical languages allow you to connect to a running system, redefine a class, and automatically update every existing instance of that class.
It's easy to just assign different functions to a metatable in lua.
That isn't the point though. You were saying lisp is some mystical thing and it is 66 years old. Its influence happened decades ago. It isn't about every language having every feature. Pretty much all software is made without lots of the features in lisp because not every tradeoff is worth it. Lisp itself is barely used because it isn't about a check list of features, but pragmatism of an ecosystem, syntax, actual compilation etc are all crucial. Lisp is not a modern tool, it is an influential invention from over half a century ago.
When people are stuck on an airplane, they don't try to watch citizen kane, they want to watch literally anything else. Influential isn't the same as being good by modern standards. People don't want to write lisp and people don't want to use software written in lisp. Sorry for the harsh reality check.
Lisp is 66 years old, I think its impact on computer science has already happened.