I share your gut feeling. It sometimes appears as if technologies that lack the opportunity for some to advance to magician status also lack a certain type of following.

That doesn't mean all technologies that have the necessary properties to allow some people to appear super human necessarily become popular. It just makes these technologies more sticky if they manage to somehow stay afloat for long enough.

I'm not sure whether or not these obscure sides of technologies are generally a bad thing. If a language provides opportunity for those who really understand it very deeply to come up with much better solutions, then that is a good thing. I would say this is the case with maths for instance, or rather with particular fields within maths.

But there are other much less favorable examples where it feels that these supposedly smart solutions shouldn't be necessary in the first place and getting even trivial things consistently right requires memorizing book length lists of rules and exceptions. CSS and C++ come to mind.