It took off because searching a specific issue is likely to give you a good and comprehensive answer back with minimal effort, so it kept being ranked well in search engines.
Other less "pedantic" forums are great for discussion and they encourage new questions, but they don't perform nearly as well for people searching for the answers or the context they're looking for: there's too much noise in the discussion and answers are often scattered in multiple topics.
Python is great, but it's so forgiving that it's easy to write garbage code if you're not very proficient and don't use the right tools with it.
The only objectively bad (major) thing against it is speed. Not that it matters much for most applications though, especially considering that most number crunching tasks will use libraries that have critical path written in a systems language:
numpy, pandas, polars, scikit-learn, pytorch, tf, spacy; all of them use another language to do the cpu intensive tasks, so it really doesn't matter much that you're using python at the surface.
I've always done it on the app, no phone call or chat. But regardless, it's not like it's going to happen. I have my cc info (and throwaway cards like privacy.com) in several websites and nothing like this ever happened. All times I've requested a refund was due to the service/product not being what was promised, not due to a data leak. The convenience definitely beats the risk.
It took off because searching a specific issue is likely to give you a good and comprehensive answer back with minimal effort, so it kept being ranked well in search engines.
Other less "pedantic" forums are great for discussion and they encourage new questions, but they don't perform nearly as well for people searching for the answers or the context they're looking for: there's too much noise in the discussion and answers are often scattered in multiple topics.