I agree, but collection literals don’t cross that threshold. They’re common but not that common, and, more importantly, the syntactic overhead can be brought down to a single character today without any language changes. Shout-out to @JD557 for his library straw man from the other thread (do look at the Scastie!)
What is an extremely common operation is to create a new object of the expected type by calling apply on that type’s companion object, hence the original “companion object apply” proposal. Limiting it to collections makes it both much less useful and easier to replace with a library. And at that point it simply doesn’t provide enough value.