> Modern Java and Go are so much faster than the alternatives that it's stupid to consider anything else if performance is important.

You answered your own question. Why bother with those languages when the language isn't the bottleneck? In those cases, what language one uses becomes an entirely subjective matter.

> All the big companies are [...]

For every large company using Java, Go, Rust, C, etc. There's another one (hell, probably the same one) also using Python, Ruby, PHP or JS.