On a more personal perspective VR to me feels like a dead-end technology that we needed to investigate, but only so we could establish that it's not the way forward; it's the crappy byproduct/technical demo for the real winner, which is augmented reality, similar in technology but completely distinct in UX philosophy.

That would be based on the idea that current technology is meant to take off, that current technology is the end goal, and that this is what companies bet all their hope on.

If you look at Meta and Zuckerberg, you'll see that from the very beginning their plans expanded far beyond 2023 and into a much longer timeline involving wildly different VR technology. There's a reason why they are betting on a neural interface wristband as the mouse and keyboard of AR/VR, because they realize that friction and physical exhaustion of moving your hands for an interface is too much and not competitive with current phone/PC interfaces, so they are chasing an interface that if truly works as intended at some point, has just about no physicality to it - which would make it the most frictionless input.

They know there is a path to solving the barriers of VR - they are just figuring out the best way to navigate that path.