As a person who has learned and used several programming languages (not exceptionally many, but enough to be able to start new projects with "hmm, so which language I already know will be the best for this"), I have never taken these language wars seriously. It's actually kinda surprising to me that some people apparently do. Do they take vim vs. Emacs holy wars the same way?

I mean, plenty of arguments used in those wars are perfectly reasonable. PHP isn't elegant. Java is verbose. C++ is overcomplicated beyond salvation. JavaScript is shit. Those are all facts ;) However, they still can and often are the best choices for a given project. Is PHP pleasant to write in and think about? Heck no, but deploying it is exceptionally easy and sometimes that's much more important. I wouldn't ever think of using JavaScript as an example of good language design, but it accidentally turned out to be flexible enough to become the lingua franca of the Web and is here to stay. No amount of drooling over Rust will change the fact that you're going to have a hard time with it on some platforms where having a proper C++ toolchain available is ubiquitous. And sometimes the way Java code use to be structured is exactly the perfect fit for a project you're working on to ensure its long-term maintainability despite of the fact that people who work on it come and go in your startup all the time (so having access to a healthy pool of Java developers to hire from who's pretty much already familiar with your project despite of never seeing it before is a huge advantage).

If those tools really were "suboptimal" they wouldn't exist anymore. They do, because they aren't - if anything, they may be poorly chosen to do a specific job.