As a long time Pythonista I was going to push back against your suggestion that Python didn't have much momentum until recently, but then I looked at the historic graph on https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ and yeah, Python's current huge rise in popularity didn't really get started until around 2018.

(TIOBE's methodology is a bit questionable though, as far as I can tell it's almost entirely based on how many search engine hits they get for "X programming". https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programminglanguages_defin...)