I believe that in an era when Coding Agents are extremely widespread, the development of the MATLAB language itself will not affect its popularity. Most people who use MATLAB do so merely to get their work done. The decline in MATLAB's popularity is more likely due to its supporting ecosystem being insufficiently refined, lacking an independent runtime environment similar to the Wolfram Language.

https://octave.org/ Try GNU Octave; it is a free software alternative to MATLAB.