That level of approval is roughly similar to what we notice among those doing technical computing in industry where Fortran is already present (often due to legacy reasons).
My hunch is an enhanced modern Fortran language standard that includes just a few better facilities (Generics, improved error termination control, intrinsic type for strings and bits, enhanced OO, and constexpr functions) in conjunction with better ecosystem overall - the kind heralded by @certik, @milancurcic , @awvwgk , @jacobwilliams , @gnikit et al. - here with LFortran, stdlib, Fortran Discourse, fpm, modern *PACK libraries, VS Code, etc. can place Fortran in the upper echelon of approval - similar to or better than Python and Julia at the SO survey - among those who have to use it in their work, particularly scientists and engineers.
Modern Fortran has a very strong foundation, it comes across as very elegant and highly performant. It is mainly being held back because of a few glaring gaps in the language standard and the tooling and the support environment.