I think good documentation, both authoritative but also that created by active users from blogs and also Stackoverflow are what make people productive in a language and enables both newcomers and experts to progress. And of course libraries and tools are being developed, which also facilitate usage. Look for example at R, much earlier than Python it had various libraries with machine learning algorithms, at the same time the language is really "unusual", so people rather rewrote libraries from scratch in Python. At least for time series analysis I think even today there are more advanced libraries available in R. But the documentation at least some years ago was just not on par with the difficulty/unconventional ways to do things. (Despite having a super helpful tightly knit community as far as I can tell) The Python equivalents on the other hand have often more documentation than needed.
I think also JS won a lot due to good documentation, in fact there used to be an SEO campaign to boost MDN docs because the JS docs used to be so bad making people write bad code, I think the language's reputation still didn't recover from that.
If you consider that you hear sound (waves) carrying a certain frequency and amplitude, this sound has a total energy. Add anti noise to it and you add additional energy. Of course the energy has to go somewhere, while it propagates through air basically the air molecules carry it. Of course then it goes into your body. Wave Physics 101, you can look it up when you google for destructive interference.
Of course that's just Physics and not Biology/Medicine. I'd be curious to hear more about it.
Many package managers that support git as source allow to pin to a specific commit sha. That's as far as I can see a quite secure way to keep using an uncompromised/verified version. It's not the most popular feature but people do it every now and then, probably it should be done more.
I wonder if docker allows this and on the other hand if that's even feasible for say application images, given that applications must be updated a lot for security reasons. Of course if the Dockerfile's parent reference is not pinned, that does only help to some degree...
I'm not sure if this is helping anyone except making people who are not bullshitters more paranoid and the bullshitters be-hated. The bullshitters in the startup world don't get big because nobody realizes that they are talking a lot of bullshit but because those who collaborate with them are at least as greedy as they are. (I was also drinking the kool aid for some time.)
So the core problem is greed and not bullshit, and this is also what makes it toxic. FWIW even the most credible and knowledgeable people are able to fan out bullshit, everybody does this every now and then.
When there are actual management problems happening, probably it's also not so comfortable for the manager to get criticised as a single person, no matter how polite it is. So jointly discussing topics should probably happen regularly.
It's always interesting to see "<insert popular paradigm/technology> sucks" headlines. Maybe that's also intrinsic to the popularity, on the one hand this got popular for a good reason most likely. But on the other many people might be very careless when using that paradigm and only inform themselves superficially - at best - about the background. That said, I really like how JS had been tamed through OO despite the FP approach being much more interesting.
When I use OO, my main motivation is also that it's easier to share code and debugging becomes much more predictable. (Aahh, it's in this encapsulated part of the code...)
I think also JS won a lot due to good documentation, in fact there used to be an SEO campaign to boost MDN docs because the JS docs used to be so bad making people write bad code, I think the language's reputation still didn't recover from that.