The problem appears to be that the health and popularity of Object Pascal is intertwined with Delphi/Embarcadero. The better of a job that Embarcadero does at

The problem appears to be that the health and popularity of Object Pascal is intertwined with Delphi/Embarcadero. The better of a job that Embarcadero does at promoting their Delphi product, the more likely people are to find out about Object Pascal being still viable and open-source projects like Lazarus/Free Pascal. And it works in reverse too, where those that use Lazarus/Free Pascal will get more professional opportunities because of companies that use Delphi.