20 and 25 years ago, the attitude (as I remember it) was that the native-code compiler was not very important because the bytecode interpreter was fast enough for most uses.

It's true that that is no longer the attitude. But if we want to understand why one language is more popular than another, we usually need to look at things that happened in the past, not just things that are happening right now. Even C's meteoric rise took 15 years from the first C compilers until it was the undisputed queen of programming languages, partly as a result of missteps made by the communities of ALGOL-68, ALGOL-W, Lisp, PL/I, SNOBOL, TRAC, FORTRAN, BCPL, and, perhaps most interestingly, MULTICS, 20 years earlier.

(It's also possible that my memory that the OCaml team treated the native-code compiler as a second-class citizen is incorrect, either because I misremember what they were saying or because I misinterpreted it.)