Popular as a "my first language" kind of thing .. not especially popular for making useful functional technical software.

In the late 70s and 80s Assembler, Pascal, C, Fortran, Modula-2, Forth, Lisp were all used to create CAD, GIS, robot control, symbolic math, abstract algebra, etc. type programs.

But any non-trivial BASIC program had to include a few machine language subroutines here and there for speed. And people knew how to “hand-assemble” them without even an assembler.