Not only politics, the reason why some languages and OSes rule, is that real progress only happens one generation at a time, to put it in a more friendly wording.

"Science progresses, one funeral at a time."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

As a general principle in life, it's quite frightening considering ever increasing life spans.

That's just a mitigation for tens of millions of lines of code written in C / C++.