Obvious answer: 3rd party library support. Same thing that makes R ubiquitous.

I would think that the reasons for "why not Scheme" would include the fact that CL has more existing libraries, better built-in support for multidimensional arrays, efficient low-level code (now even with SIMD on SBCL using SB-SIMD), application-controlled JIT compilation of specialized code, almost guaranteed support for native multithreading, etc.

Shocking. I still using the xlisp-stat based social simulation book first edition (20+ years ago). The move to ... does not fit my mind. I do not know there is a re-start!!!