I believe the point was you can say the same about goto. With goto you can replace if/else, for loops, while loops, functions, exceptions, etc, making for a very minimal language. Yet structured programming is superior.
(I probably don’t know enough about call/cc to know if that’s a totally fair comparison, but languages being more restrictive/less flexible can be good overall in terms of aiding understanding/reducing bugs/etc)
I think people are misunderstanding that you can have a small core language and use that for static analysis (a smaller language means fewer typing rules which means a simpler type checker).
You can always define higher level sugar in terms of the small core language to make it easier for programmers which has the advantage of making a more ergonomic language without changing fundamentals like the type system or linkage.
(I probably don’t know enough about call/cc to know if that’s a totally fair comparison, but languages being more restrictive/less flexible can be good overall in terms of aiding understanding/reducing bugs/etc)