[elishah]

I think an important driver in this is a persistent desire for (and faith in) novelty.

Every engineer has had unpleasant experiences with some giant convoluted messes. And there's a strong tendency to blame for that at the feet of the tools/stack/language of those messes, and believe that if we just choose something different, this time it will be clean and perfect.

Of course, some or all of that blame is undeserved. "Giant convoluted mess" is the state toward which every project will tend over time. But that rarely diminishes the totemic belief that new tools will produce different results, so an impetus toward novelty-for-novelty's-sake remains persistent.