Your view of history is not accurate. Python and Ruby were not really competing back then for building web apps. The most popular languages for that in the 00s were Perl and PHP. Ruby on Rails came along and became popular for a while and some popular sofware was written with it.
But Rails based apps then quickly developed reputations for performance issues and for managing gem dependencies being a nightmare. Then Node came along and was the new exciting thing. npm was easier to use and a lot of people jumped on that for a while. It was exciting because most of us were already fluent in JS. So it was just using a language we knew in a new context rather than picking up something totally new.
Why is Python the soup du jour lately? Well it has been around for a while and has a reputation for being mature and having mature libraries. It also became the best language to hire junior devs because of its ubiquity in US universities. Even if you don't go into CS as a major or minor there's a good chance of getting exposed to Python. It also has some advantages for collaborative codebases like the language itself being opinionated on formatting and having lots of well developed tools.
Is it the Right Choice(tm)? I dunno. It definitely has downsides as well. But every team has to decide for themselves, and not all good reasons are technical (eg the larger pool of junior devs today than say, RoR.)
But Rails based apps then quickly developed reputations for performance issues and for managing gem dependencies being a nightmare. Then Node came along and was the new exciting thing. npm was easier to use and a lot of people jumped on that for a while. It was exciting because most of us were already fluent in JS. So it was just using a language we knew in a new context rather than picking up something totally new.
Why is Python the soup du jour lately? Well it has been around for a while and has a reputation for being mature and having mature libraries. It also became the best language to hire junior devs because of its ubiquity in US universities. Even if you don't go into CS as a major or minor there's a good chance of getting exposed to Python. It also has some advantages for collaborative codebases like the language itself being opinionated on formatting and having lots of well developed tools.
Is it the Right Choice(tm)? I dunno. It definitely has downsides as well. But every team has to decide for themselves, and not all good reasons are technical (eg the larger pool of junior devs today than say, RoR.)