>You think the otherwise smart and successfull founders of these projects all made the wrong choice when it came to selecting the right tool for the job?

Nobody is perfect. Mark Zuckerberg has had his fair share of controversies for example.

>No, in the past statically typed languages were the norm. C, C++, Java...

Not good examples for your argument. These are largely considered poorly statically typed. Compare to ML, Haskell, Ada, Rust, Swift for reference.