Because it never solved a problem people actually had.
Meta has now lost close to $88 billion on Reality Labs since 2021 — more than the GDP of many countries. The original goal was 500,000 monthly active users on Horizon Worlds by the end of that year; the real number stayed under 200,000, and most people who tried it once never came back.
The pattern isn't unique to the metaverse. 3D TVs, Google Glass, and NFTs all followed the same arc: massive media hype and investment, followed by collapse, because none of them solved an urgent, specific problem better than existing alternatives did. There's actually a well-known framework for this — Gartner's "Hype Cycle" — which maps almost every new technology through five stages, from initial excitement to a "trough of disillusionment" and (sometimes) eventual real-world usefulness.
I wrote a longer breakdown, including whether AI might be following the same curve: [Metaverse]
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