"why doesn't this person have work through their professional network?"
Where I am from this is called nepotism and is frowned upon. Also a sign of a flawed job market.
to me the problem is not the language per se but the emerging complexity of a project written in a language. I.e. say I'm familiar with go and a k8s user. Does that mean that I can understand the architecture of k8s project and be meaningfully productive in a short period of time? Far from it.
Sometimes I think we focus too much and formalize on the first order tooling we use, language being one of them, while we neglect the layers upon layers of abstractions built on top of them. I wonder whether a meta-language could exist that would be useful in these upper layers. Not a framework that imposes its own logic. More of a DSL that can capture both business logic and architecture.