I agree 80% with this, I'll add something. I always had a lispy side, I hated Java, PHP, C and others prevalent languages that most companies would bet their money on, I like APL, I like Forth.

That said I found something weird, sometimes, and with a little bit of adequate libraries (guava for instance) I enjoy doing some Java. It's verbose, way more than lisp, clojure, kotlin (not even mentionning mr Haskell of course). But I find a little pleasure in doing code there. It's manual, it requires doing a lot of things but even though its slower and more "work" it's another kind of stimulation, that I think is one large factor of people doing code in subpar languages. They're just happy doing things and solving things their own way.

Some say that lisp and haskell can't be mainstream because their power is best fit for complex problems, and I think that hints to my previous point. People who need more than mainstream have the brain power and desire to solve non mainstream things.

ps: about the plumbing thing, you might have heard that MIT switched to python exactly for that reason. I was and still am stumped that the people would brought SICP decided that plumbing was the way to go.