I completely agree with your analysis of Ruby. The direction that I would love to see things move in is languages that have the expressivity of scripting languages with the safety and speed of languages like Java and C#. In particular, I'm thinking of Scala and F# (which compile to the JVM and .NET platforms respectively).

I will note that if pay is your goal, these might be better options if you are in the US. Every year that StackOverflow has published US salaries for tech, Scala has been at the top (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-what-languages-are-associated-with-the-highest-salaries-worldwide-united-states). Unfortunately, they didn't do a US-specific category for 2021. They broke things out by category globally instead.