Yup.
I think the C64 alone was responsible for a lot of the bad press BASIC got in the 1980s-1990s, from former Commodore owners who knew that one, terrible BASIC and concluded from a sample size of 1 that BASIC was bad.
Most other BASICs were better. Some on machines of the same era were much better. The BBC Micro had the same CPU and had BBC BASIC, the fastest interpreted BASIC ever written, with types, structured code, named procedures with local variables, inline assembler, rich graphics and sound support and more... in 32 kB of ROM (half for the modular extensible OS, the other half for the BASIC).
Tramiel cheaped out: the machine had 20 kB of ROM, with an OS half the size and a BASIC half the size (plus a fancy character set).
I expanded on this a few years ago, here:
https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/71381.html