That's wrong. Every civic engineer I know, for example, would prefer standard, and lacking that, popular nuts, bolts, construction parts, materials etc, over niche ones, unless there's some very pressing reason not to. They are cheaper and available in greater volumes, you can find skilled workers easier, their properties are more studied, etc.
That's even more important in programming, where ecosystem, availability of libraries, continued support on the language and compiler, availability of skilled programmers, existing codebase support, etc, matter even more than pure language level issues.
Popularity in a language is crucial, to the point that other attributes, like expressiveness, or even speed, can be inconsequential compared to that.
And while engineering can be a pop culture (e.g. Mongo or the latest fad), popularity is important for aspects that are totally counter to pop culture too: namely, pragmatism.
Programming is not about using what's "best", it's about using "what's best given business constraints" (which is something else altogether).
Besides, the hipster figure who listens to obscure music because it's "best" is also a pop culture phenomenon -- not to dissimilar to certain programming cults.