Another anecdote - Someone who hires people in D has told me definitely that D being small means that hiring for them is usually just seeing some code, i.e. there hasn't been an eternal September let's say. They can onboard people who don't know the language, but knowing D is a very good cultural (programming is easy!) filter.

Lots of stuff exist specifically to help with onboarding people into the community. Like the recent announcement of adding a C parser into the frontend.