Interesting reading. I haven't written any higher language code for many years. I play with microprocessors and use assembler, because I want exact control over what is going on. Current project has around 50,000 interrupts/second, does a bit of multi threading, computes linear least square fits to samples on an 8-bit processor. Not sure that even C could manage it. All on 5V and a few milliamp.
When I first started writing HLL the choices were COBOL or FORTRAN. Some programs were written with segments in both with a bit of assembler thrown in. I think once one gets away from the hardware, any language can be butchered to do anything. I taught assembler to a class, gave them a disassembler written in COBOL that disassembled itself. It took a while for them to get their heads around, then they would modify the source to see what the COBOL compiler did.
All programming is a compromise between competing requirements - efficiency, portability, maintenance, security, development time, learning time. Favouring one language over another can just be due to the application and have little to do with the benefits of the language. So you want a job programming web sites - knowing Forth, C or Rust isn't going to get far - PHP, javascript, CSS and HTML, even though they are not very useful generally, will do the job. Banks use COBOL, meteorologists (I believe) use a variant of FORTRAN. I think C is popular for operating systems because to some extent it is portable, has a pool of practitioners, and introduced the pointer variable that allows all sorts of efficient manipulation. I have tried to come to grips with the C variants for microprocessors, they bend so much to accommodate the particular processor they aren't that portable. The libraries are inscrutable, maybe they work, maybe they fit. So I am not a fan.
All of which is completely off topic. I was going to mention implementing security via hardware, where only a small amount of well tested code is given full privilege, and most code is run at lower security levels (VAX VMS comes to mind). But it is late and I'm going to bed.