[pdimitar]

Having as much experience as you do and still conflating "widely used because it's super good" and "widely used because of network effects and inertia" is really puzzling.

Surely you understand that your argument is disingenuous, right? Nobody wants to start over a new OS or a browser in another language due to the huge costs that no corporation nowadays is willing to shoulder (due to their own interests). Otherwise a lot of people would very definitely write OS-es and browsers in Rust, D, V even, Zig, Nim and a good amount of others.

C/C++ were there first, that's all there is to it, it's that simple.