I recall C++ OOP being the new hotness when I started out and C was always contrasted as the old & busted example. Kind of the "Everything-as-an-object will simplify everything" phase. Windows MFC was the new way, then STL.

Java WORA write once, run anywhere was definitely a thing when it came out. Java Applets came out of the woodwork and were the WASM of their day. Even Cisco ran Java for their router UI for a while, which was painful.

More recently, HN went through a period about 10 years ago where every other article ended in " ... written in Go".

The mantra may not have rhymed with "rewrite X in Y" but the spirit was there.

Kind of the opposite, I was deep in the R world a decade ago and there was a huge trend of replacing Java dependencies with C/++ ones because the JVM was such a pain to manage. The community eagerly adopted the replacements about as soon as they existed.

There were no good options previously. It was either C or C++. Most of the other languages were either fringe or had a GC, or had a pseudo runtime GC (Swift). The culture of Java and C# and Go didn't really support the type of low level optimizations needed, even though you could technically do system programming if you restrict yourself to a specific subset of language and cut yourself off from most of the standard library and ecosystem. Nim was unstable. OCaml had the same issues as Go and Java and C#. You simply did not have any options until Rust came along. Oberon was an academic trinket. The less said about the various lisps and forths the better.

OS and embedded programming require bare metal support and data structures that can run standalone in the absence of an OS and standard library, and the ecosystem must exist to support such a style of programming.

Currently Rust has over 10000 crates that would theoretically work just fine in an kernel environment.

https://crates.io/categories/no-std