[btilly]

Have you read Worse Is Better?

https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

Go and C are good in a Worse Is Better way. They are not intended for writing the perfect and ideally engineered solution. They are designed to encourage pragmatic solutions to pragmatic problems, and therefore to become popular. And the features that make them suited to becoming popular are, in fact, tied to not trying to produce absolutely ideal solutions to the hard problems.

I am therefore praising them for being good at what they were designed to be good at. And pointing to their popularity is not an appeal from authority - it is a demonstration that they succeeded at their goal.