For me, "begin" and "end" are actually much more comfortable to type, because I don't have too move my hands for that, I can stay pretty much on the home row. Curly Braces are way too far on the right top to do that and then you either have to use you weak fingers or move quite a bit.

(Granted I am touch typing and also using Colemak layout, so rarely ever move my hands. For people that hunt and pek, I believe curly braces are easier to type.)

I don't think there is much practical difference between curly-braced vs keyboard based syntax. Both are similarly easy to read, especially with syntax highlighting. After a while, your brain will automatically parse "begin" and "end" as a symbol, same as curly braces, so you won't notice the "noise".

As for the pros and cons:

Pascal style syntax is slightly better for new people learning to program. Learning how to even type those weird curly braces and understanding the difference between all the styles of braces just takes focus away from actually learning how to program.

Curly braced C-style syntax is better for people that already know how to program because everyone is already familiar with at least one curly braced language.

If you've dismissed a whole host of languages just at a glance, you're missing out. Lua has little in common with Pascal, which has little in common with Fortran, etc. As a sister post to this says, you see them more as tokens once you are familiar. Emboldening or coloring keywords also helps, as for any language.

Code is read much more times than written, and hieroglyphs don't help.

apart from that (which i agree with) is that in most pascal-like languages you have to define variables at the top of a function, and their scope is the whole function. both c (nowadays, define at top of a {} scope) and c++ (define anywhere inside a function) do much better which, together with irritating long names, may explain why c and c++ won out over the pascal-likes.

speaking as an ex professional delphi programmer here - i have written lots of object pascal code, and have no desire to write any more.

Pascal required BEGIN and END for every block, such as: IF <cond> THEN BEGIN <code> END ELSE BEGIN <code> END END, but Modula-2 and Oberon don't require BEGIN or END around code blocks: IF <cond> THEN <code> ELSE <code> END. BEGIN is now only used to denote the end of variable declaration and the beginning of the code. You can see this if you click the posted link. I think it was a valid complaint in Pascal, but not in it's derived languages.

I'm actually okay with begin and end, but, writing a function's name twice on both the declaration and after the end statement sounds like a HUGE chore. If that's mandatory, it's immediately a mood killer for me about Oberon+.

I think it's less about typing them and more about reading them. Curly braces reduce the number of keywords in the language (unless the alternative is indentation sensitivity like in Python or Haskell). This means that if I see a word, it is easier to infer if it is a variable name or if it does something structural.

How about a treesitter-based editor extension that converts between begin/end and {/}, as if they were ligatures? Actually this might not even need treesitter.

That seems like it would be a simple thing to change.