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Python was already quite popular by the time 3.0 came out in 2008, well before the AI summer was in full swing, which is a large part of what drove the popularity of NumPy et al.

You're not wrong now, but that's just the chicken, the egg included web applications and its use as a scripting language.

Python was already the scripting language of choice at CERN when I was there about 20 years ago.

Summer School computing classes even used to teach unit testing in Python.

And the Atlas HLT/DAQ build scripts were based on Python.

The counter example you’d probably want to use is Julia — it was written with scientific computing in mind, but is nowhere near as popular.

Seems that NumPy was written in Python b/c the ML community was using Python, not the other way around.