Your conclusion seems a bit reductive/circular and begs the question "yes but why does Python have momentum?" Python is/was chosen because the syntax is clean

Your conclusion seems a bit reductive/circular and begs the question "yes but why does Python have momentum?" Python is/was chosen because the syntax is clean and expressive and obvious if you speak English (which most people in this context do) and because although performance is almost always worse in interpreted languages, there are clear productivity benefits when doing the kind of programming that is demanded from data science / data processing / etc. Same for dynamic vs static typing and a number of other choices made by Python. Specifically, many (most?) programs are not long-term maintained projects in this space. A lot of them are just little scripts to convert one dataset into another format, or scrape specific content from somewhere, or support a scientific paper that will not get updated after publication.