Spaces won because of editors that allow to treat them as tabs, removing the only downside.
Tabs won, and the best languages use them.
Remember, popularity is terrible metric and is not correlated to superiority or quality. Windows is still more popular than Linux. Yet someone drags this meaningless statistic out about once a year and flogs the carcass.
Spaces won because of editors that allow to treat them as tabs, removing the only downside.