I contend that your hypothesis is equally simplistic and poorly considered. How would Python get an active community and ecosystem in the first place, if it languished for a quarter of a century?

> C++ enjoys great popularity in spite of a mind-numbingly large grammar full of arcane syntax, which grows worse as time passes. There is a lot interest in Rust, which has tons of bizarre syntax to learn.

C++ becomes less popular as its syntax becomes more arcane. Rust is a recent language and its long term survival remains to be seen. Languages are like memes: they come and they go. BASIC used to be the beginner language, now it's Python. Lua is popular due to its syntax and ease of embedding. We'll see what simplistic whitespace syntaxes come out within the next 25 years. I predict many language which exist today will fall by the wayside while newer ones replace them