alt Hacker NewsHot take: I feel like a lot of the original value of language standards was to unite multiple proprietary implementations of compilers/runtimes/etc. from different vendors, each of which had incentives to add non standard features to attract customers and keep them locked in. This has been significantly diminished in the last decade or two now that most languages have high quality open source implementations - now you can simply port your compiler of choice to the platform you need.
I half-agree with this. People occasionally argue that, e.g., Rust won't be suitable for production use until it has two fully independent mature implementations, and I consider this a silly requirement that doesn't serve any real purpose. On the other hand, once multiple separate implementations are already in widespread use, there's immense value in working out a least common denominator of language features and standard library APIs that work everywhere, so that library authors can write portable code that users of any implementation can depend on.
Of course, it's always possible that the standardization body doesn't in practice do a very good job, as seems to maybe be the case with the C++ committee. Also, I'm only talking here about technical considerations, not governance ones.