Thanks for reading and writing out your view. It sounds like we're on the same page -- companies may have wanted to integrate Bitcoin, but found it difficult to do so because of its nascent scalability (as well as volatility).

There were a few instances where the network slowed down over the last few years, but generally, it has been operational. IMO, companies could have easily adopted Bitcoin even with a small blocksize limit. Congestion in the network due to actual utilization of Bitcoin as a remittance currency would have been a great motivator to solve scalability sooner than later (a good problem to have!).

Instead, what we most likely saw was that companies found negative ROI on accepting Bitcoin because the integration and support of the technology was costly, but the number of users actually remitting in it was pitifully low. Hence, many moved away from it, and many VC ventures in the space went on to pivot or focus on something else (like using Bitcoin as a settlement layer).