I think it's just because it is always recommended as an "easy" language that's good for beginners.

The only other thing it has going for it is that it has a REPL (and even that was shit until very recently), which I think is why it became popular for research.

It doesn't have anything else going for it really.

• It's extraordinarily slow
• The static type hints are pretty decent if you use Pyright but good luck convincing the average Python dev to do that.
• The tooling is awful. uv is a lifesaver there but even with uv it's a bit of a mess.
• The package system is a mess. Most people just want to import files using a relative path, but that's pretty much impossible without horrible hacks.
• The official documentation is surprisingly awful.
• Implicit variable declaration is a stupid footguns.

The actual syntax is not too bad really, but everything around it is.