“Unintuitive” often suggests that there’s something wrong with the language in a global sense

I mean only if you consider “Intuition” to be some monolithic, static thing that’s also identical for everyone. Everyone has their own intuition, and their intuition changes over time. Intuition is akin to an opinion - it’s built up based on your own past experiences.

just because it doesn’t look like the last one you used — as if the choice to use (or not use) curly braces is natural and anything else is willfully perverse on the part of the language designer.

I don’t think it’s that deep. All people mean when they say it is that “[thing] defied my expectation/prior experience”. It’s like saying “sea food tastes bad”. There’s an implicit “to me” at the end, it’s obvious i’m not saying “sea food factually tastes bad, and anyone who says they like it is wrong or lying”.