I guess it does help by making the cost of adoption lower.
But my main point is that being an early adopter of a non-mainstream tech is fundamentally unpragmatic and usually people are driven to try something new by desire to try something __cool__ not by pragmatic considerations.
I think that it is hard to market a new "pragmatic" language because the pragmatic decision in most cases is to use an existing language that you already know, that has a community around it with all it's accumulated wisdom (documentation, tutorials, blog posts, StackOverflow Q&A), rich library ecosystem etc.
The main point of "killer feature" is not to make the language more "hypeable" but to give a potential user a clear reason why the benefits of learning your language will outweigh the costs of using a less mature or less popular technology.
But my main point is that being an early adopter of a non-mainstream tech is fundamentally unpragmatic and usually people are driven to try something new by desire to try something __cool__ not by pragmatic considerations.