Comment by rented_mule

What many startups need to succeed is to be able to pivot/develop/repeat very quickly to find a product+market that makes money. If they don't find that, and most don't, the millions you talk about never come due. They also rarely have enough developers, so developer productivity in the short term is vital to that iteration speed. If that startup turns into Dropbox or Instagram, the millions you mention are round-off error on many billions. Easy business decision, and startups are first and foremost businesses.

Some startups end up in between the two extremes above. I was at one of the Python-based ones that ended up in the middle. At $30M in annual revenue, Python was handling 100M unique monthly visitors on 15 cheap, circa-2010 servers. By the time we hit $1B in annual revenue, we had Spark for both heavy batch computation and streaming computation tasks, and Java for heavy online computational workloads (e.g., online ML inference). There were little bits of Scala, Clojure, Haskell, C++, and Rust here and there (with well over 1K developers, things creep in over the years). 90% of the company's code was still in Python and it worked well. Of course there were pain points, but there always are. At $1B in annual revenue, there was budget for investments to make things better (cleaning up architectural choices that hadn't kept up, adding static types to core things, scaling up tooling around package management and CI, etc.).

But a key to all this... the product that got to $30M (and eventually $1B+) looked nothing like what was pitched to initial investors. It was unlikely that enough things could have been tried to land on the thing that worked without excellent developer productivity early on. Engineering decisions are not only about technical concerns, they are also about the business itself.