Both Matrix and federated XMPP are irrelevant in the larger picture, but Element chose to reinvent the wheel to have a product they could more easily market to investors. Had they spend a similar amount of money and developer hours to improve existing XMPP based options we might have an actually working and popular alternative now.
But as it stands, we have a quite fundamentally broken Matrix protocol & ecosystem with some semi-usable but more modern looking clients and a working and well proven XMPP ecosystem that is extremely starved of funding and developers.
You can call this "sour grapes" all you want, but it is the sad fact and a direct result of outside investments screwing with incentives of developers.
Edit: and on an ironic side note: in 2019 Riot.im was using a fancy wrapper around Jitsi-meet for all video-calls which is internally using XMPP, so you were in fact using XMPP as that was the only usable solution back then.