Are you sure people are using it because they enjoy using it?

Yes, I'm pretty sure. In my and my friends' experience at least. As long as the codebase is of manageable size it's one of the most laid back languages out there, letting you get shit done without having to write pages of boilerplate or being lectured by a compiler. The level of abstraction is just right for the current hardware too.

I'll probably get flamed for saying this, but having all objects be hash maps that can be extended or edited at any point and be simultaneously dumpable and loadable into JSON with one line was an unfathomably big brained move. Being able to just use the data you get from various sources instead of having to create an ad-hoc struct/object that perfectly matches all types and values (and ofc crashes immediately if a change is made on the other end) is so underrated. That's not even mentioning the native async support.