Asinine may not have been the best word - but my intention is simply to note that it's a weak argument. Substitute a friendlier word if it makes your feel better.
As someone that is only working tangentially to the field... I'm not particularly concerned about who gets paid what and who's owed what credit. The discussion and points of interest to me are whether or not VR will be a significant success in this era. The implications it has on society as a whole is tremendous - on par or even exceeding the impact of the internet (and certainly VR and internet technologies will work together as impact multipliers for each other).
On one hand, as someone with experience, I respect the point of view you bring to the table. But it's important (for me) to be critical about the points been made if you believe that this is like the previous phases. I mean, I don't think it's outside any reasonable commentator's range of possibilities that VR may fail once again. But if you're making the point that it's like before (where the technology failed to gain significant consumer market traction) - that goes significantly against the grain of the consensus among those in the community. You're dismissive of that point of view, citing your experience over their enthusiasm... but the details of the specific points been made for your point of view simply aren't especially compelling.
There may be superficial similiarities between then and now. We are after all dealing with what is fundamentally the same technology. You still wear a headset, and with that, many of the same issues that plagued its past will have to be tackled.
But the critical details... the degree to which motion sickness occurs, the quality of the devices and the computers available, the market trends, etc, etc... all those things weigh well in favour of the technology's success - and there's not been that sort of detailed nitty gritty level headed assessment of the current circumstances and current technology (or at least none that I've seen) from those that would want to slow the enthusiasm to warrant real consideration of those points. The degree and trajectory of the success* of this new wave of VR may be debated, but that's not what's happening in this discussion. *success as defined by whether or not it can consistently grow in market size over the long term.
Understandably, it's not easy to get that nitty gritty analysis happening when you're not working directly with the cutting edge of the tech, and your past experiences and existing community commentary are all you have to work off. But those on the other side (and not all of them work directly with those companies, or with the hardware) have positive reports.