I think one problem is believing there exists an "average programmer". It's easy to think in averages (or medians), but the reality is that there is no average person, and exactly one median person.

Realizing that every single person is different is important, because you then start to work in more discrete niches. It's going to be much easier to appeal to "programmers who write X in Y with the following constraints" than it will ever be "programmers who write in Y".

Or to bring this closer to the topic of discussion, you'll never convince game developers to drop C++ in favor of rust using the same arguments as you'd use to convince a service developer to drop C++ for rust.

C & C++ allow quite a few things they shouldn't need to allow to accomplish their goals. They'll never stop allowing those things, so they'll never improve in certain ways.

Rust has a strong backwards-compatibility guarantee, and it has run into this issue with its standard library already. The edition system means the language can break compatibility in some cases, but the standard library can't. I suspect this will eventually prevent necessary incremental change, as it has for C & C++.

That's how you wind up with C++

A lot of people used to advocate for using their favorite ancient / artificial languages in international contexts and for communicating important matters. But somehow the C++ of natural languages became dominant.

So many different solutions. Most are preferred because of subjective reasons (although sometimes just poor reasoning period), because people think so drastically differently.