I, however, don't think most of the people who started using one of the named languages instead of their mother tongue ever really selected English using that specific criterion.
Didn't happen, they just said they'll use French during their council presidency (not the parliament, it's not even mentioned in your article), that's all, there are no rules against that. They would've done it regardless of Brexit.
Obviously this means the EU should run things in Venetian.
> lingua franca, (Italian: “Frankish language”) language used as a means of communication between populations speaking vernaculars that are not mutually intelligible. The term was first used during the Middle Ages to describe a French- and Italian-based jargon, or pidgin, that was developed by Crusaders and traders in the eastern Mediterranean and characterized by the invariant forms of its nouns, verbs, and adjectives. These changes have been interpreted as simplifications of the Romance languages.
This was an accident of history, not some deliberate plan to get the world to bow to the English speakers. And English was already well established as a major language in trade (due to it being superficially simple to learn), next to German, French and Spanish. China was pretty isolated for a long time culturally as well as geographically and the complexity of its script is another barrier to it being accepted as a common language by the rest of the world.
One of the more interesting things along this line in recent history is that with Brexit the EU no longer has an England/Wales/Scotland and a chunk of Ireland in it, but another chunk of Ireland remains. This led the French to immediately propose that French become the official language of the EU parliament but the rest of the countries wouldn't have it, and rightly so.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/brexit-franc...