I used to think this until I really took the time to dig into Rust. Rust has completely snapped me out of this depressing, "pragmatist" learned helplessness that people seem so keen to try to cram down everyone's throats these days.
"Shut up and give me another 500 lines of PHP, we have (made up) deadlines to meet!"
I agree. Ecosystem shapes how good a given language is right now but the language itself is what provides the long-term ceiling. One very real example is JavaScript. You can write all the JavaScript libraries you want and people certainly have ... but ultimately the language is what it is and many of its users still clamor for something better even after immense investment in the ecosystem.