Interesting that the semicolon was born out of a need for a longer pause in spoken language, rather than as a means to connect two independent clauses as is taught today
Virtually all punctuation marks started as prosody hints, indicating intonation and pauses, suggesting how the text is to be read aloud. In fact you can argue that this is still the case: it was only later that we invented grammatical structure rules for them, and even those are applied only in certain contexts like professional writing. In casual writing, we tend fall back to using punctuation as prosody markers, for example: "Worst. Episode. Ever."
I've come in to fix bugs caused by ASI many a time. Having an explicit character to denote the end of a statement is much more valuable than people pretend.
And don't get me started on meaningful whitespace vs brackets.
I think you quoted the wrong part of the message there, but I understand.
Still, without a line terminator you either have to use newlines, which sometimes will help make cleaner code and sometimes will make a mess of temporary variables and such. Or you have ambiguity, which is why I bring up the the anecdotes about fixing ASI errors.