I feel the same way. The initial magic of real-timeness felt like a glimpse into a future that... where is it?
I'm still excited about the prospects of it — shameless plug: actually building a tool with one-of-a-kind messaging experience that's truly real-time in the Google docs collaboration way (no compose box, no send button): https://kraa.io/hackernews
That's a really cool project! The realtime message aspect reminds me a bit of https://honk.me/, but for like, docs.
Agreed, I did a talk about exactly this earlier this year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjV3Dm5giko
Interesting talk. I think it's just a matter of making tooling where it's so easy, cheap, and simple enough that doing realtime doesn't introduce any extra time cost to a business compared to CRUD.