I’ve always used AoC as my jump-off point for new languages. I was thinking about using Gleam this year! I wish I had more profound reasons, but the pipeline syntax is intriguing and I just want to give it a whirl.

That's a perfectly valid reason.

I tried AoC out one year with the Wolfram language, which sounds insane now, but back then it was just a "seemed like the thing to do at the time" and I'm glad I did it.