I would agree with j on the fact that memory management has sort of gone out the window. But Java and Python are very academic languages, meaning that the idea of future youth finding the ease as a reason to learn the language, in my opinion, to be something to shoot for. I think a lot of modern languages shoot for this, maybe not for the academic but ease of use. No one is going to learn your language if it is complicated.
Although there are newer languages coming out that want to come back to memory management. Maybe make things better. Take Rust for example. At first it is a brick wall of doubt. However once you understand ownership, to me it is just as easy to write as Java.
But overall, yes. Hardware is cheap, and during the time those languages were made it was and still is easier to leverage the processing power rather than man power.
On a counter argument hardware limitations have also lead to different languages and libraries. Take Elixir or Java's akka, you can now work on threads, leveraging the multicore. Before you only had single core processors and now we have multicore.