[ve55]

We have better technology (and thus immersion) now. It's a simple answer, but I think largely sufficient enough to explain why things may be quite different now.

The immersiveness that can be attained via modern high-end VR systems is simply not comparable to what we had a decade ago; it enables many more use cases and paradigms that wouldn't have felt usable, interesting, fun, or sometimes even particularly social in the past. To me at least, VR/AR seem like a pretty large medium shift, and I really expect them to stick around and become a large part of society.