It has found its way in many Linux distros as a replacement for bash scripts when the implementation becomes just too convoluted. It's a boring syntax (though with few semantic quirks), intuitive to understand and hack, so the exact opposite to shell scripts. It get replaced by an implementation in C or Rust when the perfs start to falter. Another possible reason is that it's taught in college as an introductory language, and also that it became popular in AI circles, and thus models were mostly trained on it, perpetuating its usage. They got much better with other languages though, so maybe the situation is changing (improving maybe?). It has its merits: the syntax forces students to format their code correctly, it is very close to pseudo-code (is that a good thing though, in the end?).