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.
No, I'm not talking about automatic semicolon insertion. I'm talking about _ not having semicolons at all _.
Many languages are like that – in fact, almost all languages which are not descendants of the C branch.