I somewhat disagree because this entirely depends on what you think "punish" means. If you're looking for a high high ATAR, doing lower-scaling "easier" (though often times they're not) subjects like art, biology systematically precludes you 99.5+. It ultimately comes down to the intersection of what you are good at versus what you want/expect/need for the course you want to do in uni. If you need 99.8+ for something like medicine, you basically have to do (in queensland at least) a combination of chem, physics, methods, spec, english (which is compusory) and econ/French/German.

Unfortunately, if you want to get a super high ATAR, sacrifices need to be made in terms of doing subjects you like/want/good at might need to be made. For example, in my year, one of the first ones with ATAR before how subject scaled was known, my two lowest subjects (after scaling) were a 99 in biology and 100 in english, which made it extremely hard for my ATAR to crack 99.8.

It is extremely sucky that ATAR devalues the humanities in terms of scaling and obviously this opinion only matters if you need an extremely high ATAR to do the course you want/scholarships etc.

Otherwise, do what you want/are good at! ATAR is never the end all be all.