The answers would be similar to the question "why is Javascript so popular". It was not fast to run, not safe, not optimized and poor in most areas except for being almost universal and having results faster either due to js developers availability, or due to it being a high level language, even if it did try to multiply a "dog" string by 2 sometimes in some spaghetti codebase. It got better, but even before that this formula was "delivery > quality". It's also why almost no one writes assembly for production. Or C, and we get tons of bloated electron apps.

(If it was not clear, I have no love for JS and I never really programmed in it, but you have to admit, it did allow us to have more stuff. Even if 99% of it should be torched by fire if evaluated purely from engineering perspective)