There's a kernel of truth there, but I find myself regularly using languages which I hate much less.

If your best defense of a language is "well, at least people use it", that's a bad sign.

I always read Stroustrup's quote as saying, roughly speaking, that if nobody uses a language, nobody will notice its shortcomings, and if lots of people use it, lots of people will notice. In other words, popularity is no excuse for sucking, but if one is not popular, no one will notice how much one sucks.