Well, I suppose that's true, although mainstream languages that are uncontroversially Lisps, such as Emacs Lisp, Scheme, and Common Lisp, have also abandoned a lot of Lisp's bad ideas. And I do agree that Lisp isn't something toward which all other programming languages inevitably converge—neither any particular historical Lisp, nor some Platonic ideal of Lisp.

But I do think it's a sort of "linguistic extreme" that defines a dimension in programming-language space, and new popular languages tend to be pretty far in the Lisp direction. In TIOBE's top ten languages, the four I identified as "not Lisps" are pretty old: C is from, say, 01973; C++ is from 01982; SQL is from 01974 (and wasn't Turing-complete until a recent unfortunate accident, therefore not a programming language); and assembly language is from somewhere between 01948 and 01968. The other six popular languages I listed are all from 01989 or later; C# and arguably VB are from 02000.

There are several other linguistic extremes that things could have moved towards instead. For example, FORTH, Self (the essence of Smalltalk), miniKANREN (or maybe Mozart/Oz/Prolog), Coq (or at least some kind of cleaned-up ML), the π-calculus, m6, Inform 7, some kind of lazy language (maybe Haskell), and now something interesting is emerging in Rust. You could imagine a history in which all the new languages adopted key controversial ideas from FORTH or ML instead of from Lisp, but that mostly isn't the history we're in.

Java/C#/VB in particular takes pervasive ad-hoc polymorphism from Smalltalk, parametric polymorphism from ML, and type declarations from, I guess, Fortran, though detecting errors at compile time wasn't a motivation for having them in Fortran. And Python takes pervasive ad-hoc polymorphism from Smalltalk and gets its parametric polymorphism for free with the dynamic typing it takes from Lisp. (Python's predecessor ABC was a teaching language derived from ML, which is why Python spells null as None, but Python dropped the static typing.)

Here are some candidates for Lisp's abandoned or not-adopted bad ideas that come to my mind:

1. Dynamic scoping as default. PostScript and TeX do do this, but nothing else does. Even Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp have abandoned it. (And Scheme never had it to begin with.) Nevertheless, it was viewed as a defining attribute of Lisp.

2. The β-reduction model of program execution, in which the output of the program is a transformed version of the program; and, more generally, there is no clear distinction between the program and the data it processes. This was sharply abandoned in Scheme, but without abandoning metaprogramming. Mathematica is the only current language I know of that works this way. (Maybe Q?)

3. Textual serialization (READ, PRINT) as the standard and indeed only serialization. (The original Lisp and many of its successors also have pervasive serializability, which pg inexplicably omitted from his original essay: any data object can be written to a byte stream, and the same or equivalent data object can later be read back from it.) Variants of this are pretty popular; JSON.stringify, Python repr(), Firefox .toSource(), Python pickle, etc., but in most cases modern systems relieve the tensions between the different uses of READ and PRINT by providing several different serializations.

4. The general idea that the important part of software development is getting a prototype working, after which making it robust is comparatively trivial. This idea probably does not originate with Lisp, and it is popular in startup business literature, but not in current programming language design. But people use Python in Jupyter a lot to interactively explore computational ideas.

5. Symbols as the only string type, which is to say, hash-consing all your strings. This is sometimes a worthwhile thing to do in a particular library but not a good tradeoff to impose on all users of the language. Lisps stopped doing this about 50 years ago too.

I'm interested to hear which bad ideas from Lisp you're thinking of!