[bodyfour]

Yes, but Postgres had lots of technical advantages of MySQL for years, and still was less popular. For most uses people would decide "MySQL is good enough feature-wise for me. It's so popular it's probably safest ecosystem-wise"

It was the MariaDB fork that shook people up. Now suddenly the decision became "should I bet on one of these forks, or should I skip that drama and use Postgres which seems like a nice stable project" The fork is really what changed the game.