I think the whole thing boils down to utility.
Perl has, well, to say gently, less than easily manageable syntax, that was still saner than Awk and Sed. So when it became ubiquitous on most systems many complex scripting has migrated from sh/bash+awk+sed to a much saner, more developer-friendly Perl interpreter, which then started to be used for scripting webpages as that was (at the time) the next big thing.
Then came PHP and most new users never learned Perl to work solely with websites (and most never really got down-dirty to *nixen either as WAMP thingies enabled all that jazz on Windows).
Then Python became ubiquitous on most systems, and because it provides an even nicer and cleaner development experience people generally started using Python for everything they used Perl for, then more and more often for things they used PHP for, and then Data Science thing came and Python ecosystem was very quick and efficient in embracing it so it started to become the dominating language of choice for quick-fixes and one-offs and as extension inevitably for more and more large, business-critical software development, as tt's often the case thus becoming an underdog competitor to Java much like PHP was/is.
Now there are tastes and tastes but there is still some, if not generality, then at least majority or dominance. Sure, some people really love VB, but most don't. Sure, some people really hate Python but most don't.