RE "scripting" vs "compiled" - I'm probably using the semantics wrong :p
To me, "scripting" is more like... Rexxx, or Lua, or Bash. Stuff that's turing complete but more restricted in how you can express things in the code, or sandboxed (designed to be embedded). Python may have started off designed to be embedded as a scripting language, but these days it's a very very general purpose _predominantly interpreted_ language, considering where it's used and the libraries it has. It's not just used inside of Blender or OpenResty for example.
I'd argue the same about Perl and PHP. If people (psychopaths) are content with using PHP-Gtk to make _desktop_ apps, does it count as scripting language the same way "Lua embedded as a way to make Source Engine entities interactive" is a scripting language? :p
> FAANG companies such as Facebook can pick and choose from the highest caliber developers.
Sure - they have lots of money. They're also very, very big companies, with offices all over the world. Look at the sheer amount of people they hired which they backtracked on later "oops, we hired too many of you, haha, sorry! layoff time!". It doesn't take 10+ years of experience to come fresh from a coding bootcamp, complete the Google code test and become a Noogler in the "Wear OS performance metrics" team writing boilerplate AsyncTasks that call UrlRequests all day every day. Plus on the positive side they encourage people to join through undergrad / new grad schemes. Like, isn't there a whole thing about people _starting_ their tech careers in FAANG corps?
That's why many code bases are a mess because everything is dictated by almost teenagers (500 per code base ...) who rewrite everything daily.
Probably was easier to have one crack team of software developers write something new which could interpret all of the existing codebase, than it was to lead a widespread conversion of all of that code into faster languages.
ie. not everyone's a senior dev. There's reams more junior devs coming from bootcamps and such, computer science grads, etc, who can grok "scripting" languages like python and JS and Java much easier than they can pick up C++SIGSEGV or Rust algebraic data type smart pointer closure trait object macros.
Think how much of the world is boring "business logic" and it makes more sense - focus efforts making the [on the surface] simple, widespread, generalist, scripting languages, faster - we've seen it with Python, we've seen it with JS (node), we've seen it with Java.
Given how big the slow languages are, it makes lots of sense to save their CPU cycles compared to trying to hire from a much smaller pool of "competent at lower level programming" devs.