Now, that is quite a stretch. We had almost 15 years of zero interest rate economic policies, all the "cheap" capital available to everyone and you are telling me that none of the companies with a vested interest in XMPP managed to get resources to grow because Element was sucking out all the air from the room?
If getting XMPP to be in a state that could compete with the proprietary messengers were that much cheaper than the resources taken by Element, why is it that none of telcos pushed for it to have something to show in the OTT space? Or why couldn't Process.one/Prosody get any VC interested when there are so many firms that make a living of just copying whatever is trending?
You are trying to rationalize XMPP's failure to get more adoption by blaming Element, but this is not a zero-sum game. I've been to XMPP meetups, and absolutely no one ever talked about initiatives to make it more appealing to masses. Everyone just wanted to geek out and scratch their own itch. If the XMPP community never valued commercial success, fine, but then don't act like someone else robbed their lunch when all Element did was do the work that XMPP supporters didn't want to do.