Now that it has been demonstrated that your original argument has no legs to stand on you retreat to some hypothetical what-if involving popularity and two extra decades. So what if someone manages to argue against that? Will you just add 100+ million users and 50 years?

Of course culture matters. It isn’t just a side-effect of popularity. Would Scala have the same culture as Java if it became simiarily popular? I doubt it.

Rust has a culture—and it comes from a wider culture of the same ilk—where such messy shortcuts are not taken; instead “fancy language features” (much to some people’s chagrin…) like compile-time evaluation are used to make safer user interfaces for programmers. And that makes for less catastrophically buggy software.