When you put it this way, personas might be a better term than factions.

Yeah I think that's a much friendlier term. I do think language ecosystems have a hard time, because on the one hand they should be aiming to be as useful as possible, which means doing more, on the other hand they have to acknowledge that any given user will likely not use all the language and that the rest of it may hinder them, which means doing less.

C++ does a lot, but has a big disengaged crowd, for many reasons, and that crowd will suffer from the push forward. Python and Node are similar.