Hacker News has mostly discussed JavaScript and TypeScript over the past 15 years. These languages do seem to have some long-term succes.

JavaScript has success because it has a monopoly in the browser, anything you want to do there has to go through JavaScript, not because of any merit of the language.

I don't think so. Things built in those languages may have been discussed on HN, but the amount of discussion about those languages has not been proportional at all to their popularity.