Hobbies are very different than company projects like this. With hobbies, we don't really care about ROI; we do it for the fun of it. In companies, ROI is very important.
And naming the successes doesn't tell you much about the odds; you also have to count the failures. One can't justify the purchase of a lottery ticket by looking only at the winners.
Sure, but that strikes me as the exception that proves the rule. JS succeeded not because of language merits, but because it had strong distribution. JS was basically held in contempt for a decade until the platforms and the language matured enough to make it useful for something more than button rollovers and form validation.
I've been holding it in contempt for two decades and doubt I will ever stop. Spending some time on a static analysis project for JS recently only reinforced that opinion.
And naming the successes doesn't tell you much about the odds; you also have to count the failures. One can't justify the purchase of a lottery ticket by looking only at the winners.