Even at the time, EOS didn't look great. The technicals just weren't there for the protocol. It was joked to be the AWS of blockchains -- ie. essentially centralized, same with Ripple.

It was definitely not the most promising. I would argue that most of blockchain is still in its early infancy. Only very recently has second layer stuff really begun to scale reasonably well. Once Eth 2 comes out and scaleability takes off I think we'll see a huge amount of growth. Right now we're in the 1200 baud dialup phase connecting to a BBS that costs $2 per minute to use. It's not practical yet for 98% of applications. It will be, and I think within 1-2 years.