It can. However, Julia made a very strong push to target the scientific computing niche (very strong array support, ease of writing tight loops in native code, etc) - and such it has a very quickly growing ecosystem of high quality scientific packages.

In comparison, Julia has relatively few web frameworks, GUI toolkits, etc..

Sure it can. But why would I pick it up over, say, rust? Rust gives me the productivity of a dynamic language, and the speed of a systems language. Julia gives the same. So, given similar pros/cons, the choice comes down to aethsetics, and Julia just didn't give me a compelling enough reason to switch.