> Python got big by impeccable marketing

This is so further from the truth that it hurts. It sounds like you're fairly new to python, and you probably only saw python in its third or fourth "wave" at which point there were alternatives, and you could ask why was python being promoted.

- The first wave was systems programming (replacing aging perl and bash scripts) - Second wave was web, with django, flask etc. This is also the rise of Ruby on Rails. This cemented python's stature. - Third wave was data analysis, fueled by numpy and pandas - Fourth wave is ML, building on top of third with tensorflow and pytorch.

You can argue we've in the fifth wave with LLMs, but it is mostly a 4.5 in my head.

If you dont remember waves 1 or 2, it is hard to get a perspective. But python was much much much big by wave 2.