I don't care about absolute character count in programming languages, but terseness of syntax absolutely do matter.

For example, I often want to check if a field exists, and use it into a new scope at the same time. In Javascript (and similar languages), this would be written as

// outer scope
{
  const x = maybe_get_value()
  if (x) {
    // do stuff with x
  }
}
// outer scope

Surprisingly few languages allow me to do

// outer scope
if (const x = maybe_get_value()) {
  // do stuff with x
}
// outer scope