Off-grid messaging is helpful for my family (skiing, camping, hiking). They have zero interest in ham radio but a funny looking messaging app isn't a problem. Regular walkies talkies (FRS, GMRS) don't relay/hop, work asynchronously, or transmit GPS positions.
Yeah this was the reasoning behind Meshtastic and it still works very well in this usecase. Folks trying to scale these meshes run into all sorts of issues inherent to routing over a mesh with infrequent and unstable nodes. But for a messaging app in a remote area it works great.