I think we simply approach software different. I feel that small, composable applications should be the default, and I nearly always start off this way. I've been involved in projects from writing a specialized version of cp, ETL processes, to developer focused but consumer-facing web applications and the first interface I write to anything I do is as a small cli application that works well with standard unix tools.
When you embrace this philosophy it doesn't particularly matter how good a language's ecosystem is, you have all of unix to interop with. For example, I don't care if a language has a good JSON parsing because jq[1] exists and is probably faster and easier to work with than just about any language's built in tools, even better than JavaScript itself.
With JVM you can't participate in writing software this way. Everything must revolve around the JVM and it's ecosystem.
When you embrace this philosophy it doesn't particularly matter how good a language's ecosystem is, you have all of unix to interop with. For example, I don't care if a language has a good JSON parsing because jq[1] exists and is probably faster and easier to work with than just about any language's built in tools, even better than JavaScript itself.
With JVM you can't participate in writing software this way. Everything must revolve around the JVM and it's ecosystem.
[1]http://stedolan.github.io/jq/