I'm not sure this applies as strongly in Minecraft's case specifically, because of the critical importance of its modding community to its wild success. Normally it wouldn't matter what language you pick in terms of how popular the game is going to become, except it just so happened that by choosing the JVM they gave the ability to the community to decompile the game and add the content they want. Maybe this wasn't intended and Notch chose Java because it was what he happened to know, but it's my belief that if Minecraft had been written in C++ instead then Mojang would not have the brand recognition it does today. Anecdotally one of my friends tried the RTX version of the game which was rewritten in C++, and his reaction amounted to "it's fine, but there's no mods, so it's irrelevant." And that's in spite of the fact that modded Minecraft is a minefield of incompatibilities between years old versions and can easily consume 10 gigabytes of RAM and millions of extraneous CPU cycles. Nobody cares, because at the end of the day modded Minecraft is the only way they can get the specific experience they want out of a video game, and the only reason this is possible at all, even if it will never be performant, is the JVM.
But that's only because Minecraft is one of the most popular video games in history, and not the kind of thing that a developers for a game nowhere near as successful would worry about before gaining a sizeable audience. What good is a modding system if not many people want to use it? And depending on the game a mod system might not be as warranted, so in those cases the choice of language doesn't matter as much.