I switched from ColdFusion years ago as my primary language cause of the job market (as i'm sure many others have), not because it is a bad language OR because it was tag based. to be completely honest, ColdFusion itself is an outstanding product and STILL is so easy for a barrier of entry and setup.
the things (to me) that are kill it a) the price is ridiculous, b) they never officially supported a framework in the era of MVC (ColdBox, FW/1, CFWheels would all have made a good candidate) and c) they never listened to their developers about features to implement.
I'll add that when Adobe CF introduced a "richer" script syntax, it wasn't complete and along the lines of too little, too late. This is where MACR stagnated. Had CF introduced a full blown scripting language in the early 2000's, CF would certainly have a little more staying power these days, especially with open source implementations like Lucee.
The biggest problem for ColdFusion is that there was a time (2008-ish) that the open source web development world innovated and evolved by leaps and bounds around it and CF stood still. One of CF's biggest selling points was that it wasn't open source and that it wasn't PHP. I'm not knocking PHP; the reality was that there were a ton of companies that would steer clear or open source projects back in the mid-2000s. If you were doing "enterprise" web development in 2003-2005, you were either doing Classic ASP, Java, or ColdFusion.
I made a decent career as a ColdFusion developer for about 10-years. I embraced Lucee when it first was launched, and I still use it when I get in a bind.
But that being said, I bit the bullet about 3-years ago, and switched to NodeJS. It's simplicity and speed just doesn't compare.
The CF community has failed to realise that web pages don't really refresh anymore. We are in a world where JavaScript rules the front end, single-page apps are king. So the only useful part of CF is as an API engine, and frankly, NodeJS, Go Lang, Elixir, and Python will all run circles around it.