I think there is a problem in your thinking with conflating "simple" and "practical". You can have a more complicated thing being more practical simply because there is a better tooling or ecosystem, as you correctly point out.
> What is the worth of "simple" if it is not "practical"?
I cannot speak for js8, but I think you took his or her statement of personal preferences as a statement of value. (That is, I think that the statement that he or she preferred a simple language was not the statement that it was 'worth' more in any abstract sense.) I imagine that everyone in this discussion would agree that 'simple' and 'practical' are different. I personally think that the lambda calculus is even simpler than the theory of Turing machines, and yet probably still less practical. I enjoy the theoretical beauty and austerity, and I imagine that js8 is in somewhat the same boat.
(For an extreme example of going the other direction, consider Perl, which is an eminently, even sometimes excessively, practical language, but which none among even its most ardent fans—and I am one!—would call simple.)
Turing machines can do all computable things. They are the most simple computers yet they are not practical at all.
> You can have a more complicated thing being more practical simply because there is a better tooling or ecosystem
The point I am making is that after 25 years of age "simple" Haskell should have be a better ecosystem than Java.