Of course it couldn't. Messaging was moving very rapidly with new features like stickers, reactions, expiring messages, phone number IDs, SMS fallback, stories, bots...and all of this had to be presented a very integrated and user-friendly package. You simply can't move that fast (or move much at all) with a huge standard like XMPP with 20 different clients that barely change.
Not to mention that in this capitalist society, messaging services are incentivized to grow at all cost because user-base is the best fuel for monetization. Holding onto XMPP federation like Google did in XMPP's final years of relevancy would be suicide; you would be helping your competitors while gaining nothing.
But by that same token, could it be possible for a new standard which incorporates all those features to become viable when the messaging space has stabalised?
Not to mention that in this capitalist society, messaging services are incentivized to grow at all cost because user-base is the best fuel for monetization. Holding onto XMPP federation like Google did in XMPP's final years of relevancy would be suicide; you would be helping your competitors while gaining nothing.