Speed of development is a legitimate factor to consider when making a choice of language for a project.
> I feel like the programming world is going strongly in the opposite direction.
There's a concerted corporate effort to push the programming world in that direction. It's not born out of a particularly strong rationale and not backed by the kind of organic efforts that would actually ensure it's long term success.
Meanwhile we have the technology to fully isolate every process on a machine from everything else on the machine. Do we use this? No. Instead we harass programmers to use languages based upon corporate tastes instead of actual engineering acumen. The desktop doesn't get any more secure and opening a random text message can destroy your life regardless of what language the messaging application was coded in.
What are we doing?