C++ can do a lot of things but one thing it can’t do is perform as poorly as python.

That might be true of VHDL / Verilog programmers I guess.

Python’s become very widely used in industry - it’s definitely a plus when looking for jobs these days. TIOBE now says it’s the most popular language in the world.

I think the timeline’s a bit off here.

OP describes how primitive computing was in the 80s and 90s, and speaks of a number of developments which appeared “leading up to the year 2000”. Let me give examples of all of these developments which were actually from the 1970s or earlier:

• The VAX-11/780 was introduced in 1977, pretty much introduced the concept of a modern MMU and memory model - although there were plenty of precursors. They were very popular and widespread.
• Lisp’s been around since 1958. It (and other languages) used memory managed runtimes similar in concept to today’s ones.
• IBM’s VM/370 OS introduced virtual machines on IBM mainframes in 1972. They were an integral part of the OS and CPU architecture, probably more so than current VMs which are kind of tacked on as an afterthought.
• Modular programming languages were a big topic in this era. One that comes to mind is Modula-2 which was first introduced in 1977, but much programming language development at the time was focused on modularity and code reuse.
• And JITs date back to 1960.

My point is that I think these advancements were made a lot earlier than OP’s saying. Sure, some of them took a while to spread but we pretty much started the 80s with all of this already in place.

Like the Apple Lisa for example. Named after his daughter.

Don’t you mean:

class AgreementManagerClass {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("I agree."); 
    }
}

Go’s less verbose than Java in my experience. And I’ve written quite a lot of both. But YMMV.

And yet C with its not at all comprehensive standard library did well. I’m a bit puzzled about these results.

There’s no way that Go is more verbose than Java. I’ve written both in decent quantities and Java was always way more verbose than Go for me. I suspect it’s the nature of code.golf giving these results more than the languages themselves.