I don’t have a dog in this race but I was also around at that time and one reason is there was far less choice in 1995 about where you would go from C. C++ was also a vastly simpler language back then (no templates, no exceptions, barely a few hundred command line options). So I am not sure what its adoption then can teach us about language adoption now.

I don't think it's true there was far less choice in 1995. Around that time (a few years later) I was working on a project that was half Ada half C++, and there were a few more exotic choices around. Aside from those, and C, there were still projects in the company back then written in Fortran and even in Jovial. At university, I learnt Esterel for formally-verified embedded software. And that's not even touching on the higher level space, where VB, Delphi, some Smalltalk, and a large selection of other "RAD tools" were being used (my first summer job was on what today would be called an ERP system written in a language called Business Basic). At university, the language I was taught at intro to compsi was Scheme (that was also the embedded-scrpting language we used at work). We were also taught ML and a bit of Haskell.

It's true that not many languages that seemed a reasonable choice at the time survived to this day as reasonable choices.