The stewardship and economics of the language can also be the issue. I started coding in the 80's and so web development for me evolved at the inception of the field. I will go to my grave insisting that Coldfusion was a better platform than PHP, but it was always commercial with a financial barrier to entry. PHP being free led to a glut of PHP developers, low-cost hosting, and an enormous ecosystem that ultimately redirected the course of the early web.