While writing the text editor sam [6] in the early 1980s, Rob Pike wrote a new regular expression implementation, which Dave Presotto extracted into a library that appeared in the Eighth Edition. Pike's implementation incorporated submatch tracking into an efficient NFA simulation but, like the rest of the Eighth Edition source, was not widely distributed. Pike himself did not realize that his technique was anything new. Henry Spencer reimplemented the Eighth Edition library interface from scratch, but using backtracking, and released his implementation into the public domain. It became very widely used, eventually serving as the basis for the slow regular expression implementations mentioned earlier: Perl, PCRE, Python, and so on.
I see no reason why popular languages couldn't implement both algorithms, though, and then select the backtracking one only if the regexp contains backreferences or expressions. It's easy enough to tell if a regexp uses these features, just checking for their existence when the regexp is compiled. Then you could use the fast algorithm when possible and the featureful one when not.