It seemed like the only people who could remotely have been considered excited about the concept was a very particular slice of the tech media echo chamber. The Snow Crash Metaverse was kind of fun to think about. The Mark Zuckerberg Metaverse was DOA given the trashed reputation Facebook had by the time the pivot was announced.
And the product wasn’t good. Quest 2 is pretty good but it’s not ready yet for a few more years. Their software and “games” are just soulless
Advertising is cancer, marketing is a blight upon every facet of humanity.
It should be no surprise a medium designed to facilitate marketing first, and "be barely engaging enough to ensure most people can visit and be exposed to marketing without having a strikingly negative impression" is going to be soulless.
Even in real life, businesses and stores are built where there is already demand. stores do not create demand. The commercial-first approach to a metaverse is akin to building a shopping mall deep in the Sahara desert and expecting people to move next to it and found a town. At most you'll get a town of the mall's employees.
The Internet was successful because it didn't start out as what it is today. It was about people and their creations first. I hypothesise if e-commerce was indeed the first feature of the Internet, vastly less people would be engaging with the Internet nowadays. Why go to a store with the most unrelenting salesman ever by your side, on a medium you have absolutely zero idea how to use and interpret?