> There is little innovation in the database space: there are hundreds of general-purpose programming languages, but very few "database" languages.

How many of those are "innovative"? How many of those have an ecosystem around them that can be taken seriously?

There's maybe one innovative language per decade. Minor improvements to an existing language (with a load of unnecessary syntax changes) don't make up for programming in a barren ecosystem. And a bunch of wrappers around C libraries don't make an ecosystem, they don't allow the language to materialize any actual new paradigms and just result in a C dialect.