[jeltz]

I feel that is a bit of a false history. OOP was invented by people trying to simulate physical systems, e.g. Stroustup, the Simula people and their contemporaries not business people. Arguably it was popularized later by business people and enterprise Java developers. But that happened way later.

I do not think OOP ever really worked out well as can be evidenced by it no longer being as popular and people having almost entirely abandoned "Cat > Animal > Object" inheritance hierarchies.

[9rx]

This is also a bit of a false history. OOP was squarely invented with Smalltalk. The term was literally conceived for Smalltalk to describe its unique (at the time) programming model. While objects most certainly predate Smalltalk, it was Smalltalk that first started exploring how objects could be oriented.

OOP didn't really take off either, but mostly because it is hard to optimize and impossible to type.

[jeltz]

I will have to just disagree with you here. Simula had OOP before Smalltalk existed and both Smalltalk and later C++ arose out of Simula.