Ruby became popular mainly because of Rails, which has gone down somewhat in popularity in recent years.
That may be why Ruby is less popular now than it was 10 years ago. Also, they (Ruby and Rails) got popular much before 10 years ago, like around 2006 / 2007, when the Web 2.0 wave was starting. I had worked on a couple of dot-com projects in Ruby on Rails at that time, that is how I know.
And Python got popular cause of LLM AI thing. It is a shame, cause it is quite slow. I had some good time with jython back in the 2 days, but really wished something more elegant (nim/rust/ocaml) has taken over this AI thing instead of python.
One thing is for sure, don't get tight down to one language cause it is popular today. Go with whatever make sense for you and your project.
There has been several other events like that (Django, Pandas and data science..). I don't think Python's popularity can be ascribed to any single event, it just happens to be a language that is reasonably close to pseudocode with an excellently thought-out (I mean best in the industry) standard library. Python is practical, first and foremost. That's why it won, unlike other languages it doesn't really have an ideological agenda.
Zope predates all of those, and slowly as you say people got interested and started using it for other stuff, like being a better Perl.
Python has an agenda as well, Guido has said multiple times it was a language designed for teaching programming, and one of the reasons Zen of Python came early on.
Before AI, Python was still extremely popular for any sort of data science (possibly because of numpy first, then pandas, but I don't claim any historical knowledge here). And independent to that it was, before the raise of server side JS, one of the most popular server side web languages (probably still is).
Also around the mid '00 it started replacing perl as the unix scripting language of choice.
