> Maybe because we use these tools with our minds so it's a very intimate thing. Maybe because people find hard to learn a set of tools due to so much of foundational knowledge behind it having been abstracted away so they develop mental defenses against other sets of tools as a rationalization of why they don't wanna lose the sunk cost

It is both of those things, I think, and more. For me, at least in Elixir's case having come from Ruby, it is also that I am acutely aware that Elixir virtually eliminates entire classes of bugs that in some cases took me months to run down in Ruby.