It was designed by a person with good taste, not by a committee. That's about it, there's nothing inexplicable or accidental about a well designed language rising to the top.
The excessive mentions of Perl are weird — it, along with PHP are prime examples of awful taste. Those are the languages that only gained any traction because they happened to be available at the time, not because they were any good.
To be fair, it is my understanding that PHP is still king in the niche of "simple language with practically zero cost to spin up and deal with a web request."
Now it _may_ be that the erroneously named "serverless" architectures that are the soup du jour will make this less true, but I don't have enough insight on web stuff to know how that's proceeding.
The excessive mentions of Perl are weird — it, along with PHP are prime examples of awful taste. Those are the languages that only gained any traction because they happened to be available at the time, not because they were any good.