What you say about traction is a good point. I think "will it be successful?" is a very different question to "will I like it?".
At one end of the scale for me is Rust. I discovered it through organic hype and I like the language but it's not successful enough for me to have found a job writing Rust.
At the other end is TikTok. I saw many ads for it before anyone I know ever talked about it. It's massively successful but it doesn't appeal to me in the slightest.
I'll readily judge a new programming language or library based on the quality of its presentation, because if no thought is being given to presentation, I can tell already that it's not going to get much traction. And if a PL doesn't get much traction, its ecosystem and even its long-term development will likely suffer.
Although- that's really just a minimum bar, and I agree with the author that Java went way way beyond that, and had more money tied up in that than felt warranted, so I probably would have had the same feelings