Ironically, I think most of Racket's popularity is driven by its Lispiness. People want to get into this 'Lisp' stuff and everyone recommends Racket. I personally learned Racket because as a dumb teen Googled "how to become a hacker".

The first result was Eric Raymond's article How To Become A Hacker, which recommended learning Lisp. I looked into Lisps and ran into the book How to Design Programs which recommended the IDE DrRacket.