I think making arguments about programming languages fitting the hardware to explain their popularity doesn't make much sense outside of high performance or low

I think making arguments about programming languages fitting the hardware to explain their popularity doesn't make much sense outside of high performance or low level system programming. The obvious counterexample is languages with garbage collection, which is enormously popular (e.g. Github's five most popular languages by repository employ garbage collection: https://githut.info/ https://githut.info/ ). Another popular feature is dynamic type systems.