In absolute terms, more people use Fortran today than at the height of Fortran's market share.
We should celebrate basically any additional to this landscape.
At the same time, I learned Haskell many years ago and didn't really understand functional programming until that point.
The two most influential languages in history are Smalltalk and Lisp, both of which never gained broad adoption.
Option 1: Bootstrap on an existing ecosystem. Be highly compatible, but add a lot of value. Best example today is probably Webpack (yes, webpack is a platform).
This was Node.js' strategy but Go is probably a better example.
But Go went even farther, no libc dependency, everything ever had to be written from scratch.
There is no roadmap, no plan, that can dictate the point at which you have to support a bad decision forever. Pressure from adoption does that for you.
The original plan was to liberally break compatibility until 1.0 but as of 0.2 too many people depended on API we couldn't change.
But adoption was too dramatic, people were running real production workloads at scale already, we couldn't go breaking things without causing massive backlash.
This has let them fix mistakes they couldn't have fixed if they had seen faster adoption.
The more adopted a platform the less consistent the API will be, the more warts, etc. The best you can do is keep stdlib small so that you have less opportunity for inconsistencies.
It makes sense that we might see other verticals, like cloud functions, get their own too