Many people choose what language to invest time in based on the labor market for that language. Companies shouldn't be so religious about the languages they use, but for small teams they usually pick one language for the entire company so that devs can hop between projects without any linguistic learning curve. Hence why there are so many Node + React companies out there; you hire a bunch of react bootcamp grads and they can quickly start working on backend features as well since they already know javascript.
In an ideal world, you hire engineers who have a breadth of knowledge of programming instead of specializing in one language/framework, and then it doesn't matter if a language is "dead" or not, you just pick the best tool for the job. Unfortunately, there's not enough good engineers to go around for such a strategy. As it stands, I would estimate that most people employed with the title of "Software Engineer" barely know what they're doing
In an ideal world, you hire engineers who have a breadth of knowledge of programming instead of specializing in one language/framework, and then it doesn't matter if a language is "dead" or not, you just pick the best tool for the job. Unfortunately, there's not enough good engineers to go around for such a strategy. As it stands, I would estimate that most people employed with the title of "Software Engineer" barely know what they're doing