In the mid-to-late naughts there arose the diploma mills, offering short programmes to turn students into silicon valley hopefuls. It fundamentally shifted the culture of software development.

There was also a dire need for more programmers. I think the industry would take what it could get.

I love learning interesting niche languages and also wish it was still the case that learning interesting languages purely out of interest was common.

But I'm afraid that the network effects that favor large languages are only getting stronger over time. It's very hard to convince someone to learn a new language if they're used to finding the answer to almost every question they can think of on Stack Overflow and find free libraries for almost any task on GitHub. Your niche language will have neither of those things. Large languages will continue to consolidate and become impossible to displace, even if a new language pops up that is strictly better in terms of design.

Entrenched programming languages have reached the point where, I believe, they will never be displaced. So there are certain obvious mistakes, such as every object in Java being nullable, that we will have to live with in perpetuity.