It's embarrasing
And we have these non-technical influencers just confidently repeating nonsense about possible soft forks. fud works
Discussion
I think it has only probably worked because the core developers were massively supportive of it.
Now they are not because none of the current proposals is cool enough or does cryptographic tricks enough, or, as nostr:npub185h9z5yxn8uc7retm0n6gkm88358lejzparxms5kmy9epr236k2qcswrdp and nostr:npub1s6z7hmmx2vud66f3utxd70qem8cwtggx0jgc7gh8pqwz2k8cltuqrdwk4c said recently, because none of the covenant proposals offer any really decent scaling solution enough to excite anyone not even as a promise (except for Mercury statechains of course, but this one is often forgotten for reasons I don't understand).
Oddly, though, Taproot not even hinted at any scaling benefits and it didn't feel really exciting to anyone I think, but still it was good, reasonable, ok (as are most of the current covenant proposals).
I was heavily focussed on multisig wallets back around 2019 when Taproot was being designed and actively reviewed.
Musig and being able to hide conditions seemed very useful for that. So the Taproot soft fork touched things very close to what I was working on already.
I even launched an app called NthKey, which was a massive flop.
Pareto was on to something.