I don't think it's nonsensical to use less popular/exotic languages. I prefer to write code in languages that I like to write in, as long as it's a good enough tool for the job.

The real problem with them is that while you and I might be interested in functional languages, our coworkers/managers aren't and we have to stick with the languages we might not find as immediately exciting, like python.

Side node, python has Hy (https://hylang.org), which is essentially a lisp implementation that compiles to Python's AST. The entire python ecosystem and stdlib is available to Hy, so it's as batteries included as python is. It's a blast to use, but similarly I wouldn't expect my job to be excited about it.