Not true. The rise of Scala itself is probably the clearest counterexample; there is no socioeconomic case for it, it's succeeded purely on its technical merits.

Quite a bit of Scala's design was influenced by the goal of Java/JVM compatibility. This was clearly a purely "socioeconomic" decision. Without this compromise, Scala would never have taken off.

I disagree. There are any number of failed JVM languages, and no non-JVM equivalent of Scala that I'm aware of. The biggest effect of the JVM on Scala was a "free" high-quality (and high-performance), multithreaded, garbage-collecting runtime (contrast with OCaml) which is an engineering-driven decision.

Scala's success has technical and socio-economical causes. Here are some more non-technical factors.

- The existence of a reasonably well-funded organisation (Typesafe/Lightbend) stewarding Scala was well-received.

- Typesafe/Lightbend's independence also helped, in the sense that I cannot see a Scala-like language succeeded if it had come from e.g. Oracle.

- Scala's open-sourcing of everything helped.

- The well-executed and well-timed Scala-MOOC also helped a great deal.

- Odersky's fame and track-record helped too.

None of those might have driven your Scala adoption (or mine), but they might have helped others to shift their dev towards Scala.

You realize that all of that (except the last point) happened after Scala got traction?

That depends on what you mean by tracking. Typesafe was founded in 2011. Scala really took off around 2013 in my entirely unscientific observation.