I think there's a growing trend towards awareness of multiple languages, and Smalltalk may be seeing a share of that. For whatever reason, developers are starting to be (a little bit) more open to expanding their language horizons.

I definitely agree. Nice to see that smalltalk is still being used. I haven't worked with it for over 20 years and predicted it's demise back then even though I thought it was a very powerful and useful language. Fortunately I was wrong.