[snicker7]

It comes down to timing, really. Just like most technology fads.

Python is interpreted/dynamic, open source, general-purpose, relatively popular, and is easy to write low-overhead wrappers to C/C++/Fortran libraries. In 2008-2010, when ML took off, Python was the only language with these properties.

Python, however, has its problems: an atrocious concurrency story (GIL, colored coroutines, asyncio vs trio rift, fork is inefficient thanks to GC, etc), highly non-compostable (especially in scientific computing), and package management is broken. The language is also inherently slow (unfixable). It will be replaced by something else eventually.