If you want to say that popular isn't better, you have to say that with a lot of people are either making bad choices or lack agency.
Neither of which makes sense when you look at something like Git or Linux, where someone decided to make a whole new thing without dependencies, and it displaced the previous thing, and the people who use it don't need to care what language it was written in.
I want to say popular isn't _necessarily_ better. Your argument is a counterexample if I had said (which I didn't) that more popular were _always_ worse.
In the world of programming (and I guess elsewhere, too), there are simply many more aspects at play when "choosing" the programming language than purely how good the language itself is. Easiest example is Javascript were it's simply widespread because it was the only language available in the browser. I recommend again that you watch the video :-).
Neither of which makes sense when you look at something like Git or Linux, where someone decided to make a whole new thing without dependencies, and it displaced the previous thing, and the people who use it don't need to care what language it was written in.