[TimTheTinker]

DSLs are not all created equal.

Consider MiniZinc. This DSL is super cool and useful for writing constraint-solving problems once and running them through any number of different backend solvers.

A lot of intermediate languages and bytecode (including LLVM itself) are very useful DSLs for representing low-level operations using a well-defined set of primitives.

Codegen DSLs are also amazing for some applications, especially for creating custom boilerplate -- write what's unique to the scenario at hand in the DSL and have the template-based codegen use the provided data to generate code in the target language. This can be a highly flexible approach, and is just one of several types of language-oriented programming (LOP).

[Lerc]

I think Sturgeon's law might be the problem for DSLs. Enabling a proliferation of languages targeted at a specific purpose creates a lot of new things with a 50% chance of the quality being below the median. Using a general purpose language involves selecting (or more usually relying on someone else's earlier selection) one of many, that selection process is inherently biased towards the better languages.

Put differently, The languages people actually use had people who decided to use them, they picked the best ones. Making something new, you compete against the best, not the average. That's not to say that it can't be done, but it's not easy.