I'm glad you mentioned D and I literally paused while writing the above to consider if I should include it. Back when I was writing a lot of C++ (decades ago now) my greatest hope was that D would catch on. It is hard to say why it didn't and I think all of the hype on the C++ successor goes to Rust these days. Zig is probably the most likely candidate for a C replacement even though D has a subset termed as Better C.
It really is the case that there is an endless list of programming languages now that serve as inspiration for almost every use case. I mean, I didn't even mention Clojure or Julia or Lua ... the list of truly interesting language and approaches is almost endless.
I see the potential in D, what I think it needs is a batteries included web framework maybe built on top of Vibe.d or forked from Vibe.d that means you don't have to piece together all the missing pieces. The more you can get done OOTB in a language, the more likely you are to use a language / framework.
It really is the case that there is an endless list of programming languages now that serve as inspiration for almost every use case. I mean, I didn't even mention Clojure or Julia or Lua ... the list of truly interesting language and approaches is almost endless.