Agreed - my view is that Linux on the desktop failed and will never succeed and its mostly alright since people have shifted their computing needs from desktops to phones.
So the market for personal computers has grown massively with phones entering it, and Linux has won here.
As to the general state of Linux usability - I’ve been using Linux since 1995, and professionally for more than 20 years - it’s great for professionally administered servers or workstations, less great for regular desktops / laptops where things pretty never work out of the box which is unfortunately not going to bring in extra users …
Linux may have won on phones, but free software did not, which is the thing that actually matters.
That’s a different issue but you have a point esp since the Linux vs windows fight back then was essentially framed as proprietary vs free.