Hah!
Ruby, Python, and Perl all had similarly good package ecosystems in the late 1990s, and I think any of them could have ended up as the dominant scripting language. Then Google chose Python as its main scripting language, invested hundreds of millions of dollars, and here we are. It's not as suitable as Matlab, R, or Julia for numerical work, but money made it good enough.
(Sort of like how Java and later JavaScript VMs came to dominate: you can always compensate for poor upfront design with enough after-the-fact money.)
I think that gives Google too much credit (blame?). Perl, for example, started to become increasingly painful as the objects users wanted to manipulate outstripped the natural reach of the language (hence the infamous modem noise sigil pile up, @$[0]->\$foo@ etc). It also did not help that the Perl community took a ten year diversion into Perl6/Raku. Circa 2005, Python looked like a fresh drink compared to Perl.
Yep. CPAN was impressive in the late 90s. I loved writing Perl at the time, other than the sigil explosion. The first time I wrote some Python (“OMG, everything is a reference?!”) was just about the last time I ever wrote any new Perl code.
I made that switch before I’d ever heard of Google, or Ruby for that matter. My experience was quite common at the time.