My understanding is the thing about the binding system that drove adoption more than anything was due to how easy it was to generate bindings for an existing C library. This drove stdlib expansion and allowed rapid repurpose of huge amounts of long-standing and popular C libraries, and it also added instant credibility for those that already trusted those libraries. This helped avoid the chicken and egg problem of not enough devs for a serious stdlib, but not serious enough stdlib to draw dev (which is where most languages, even good ones, die).

I distinctly remember that during the time period where Python grew from “minor” to “dominate” (roughly 1995-2005), doing Python dev was often a process of answering “are there bindings for that?” And usually _there were_, because of that tooling.