.net and java aren't unpopular because of their compiled nature. They are certainly much more performant and development lifecycle is quicker. The problem is their licensing fees. Python, Ruby, Node, and PHP have no licensing free and deployment costs are negligible. Most developers would agree that PHP is horrible; despite that it is very popular, because it is free.
Once performance becomes an issue, compiled languages become more advantageous. This is why twitter is now on java/scala, and stackoverflow is on .net.
Dynamic languages are certainly less restricting and may be faster to development at the start, but have a major maintenance and debugging cost. I shutter when I think about trying to modify and huge javascript or php codebase. With .net, no big deal.
As a personal preference, I like objective-c, it has the benefits of dynamic and static languages and it very performant. Too bad it is mostly limited to the apple platform.