In aggregate, there's a fairly hefty amount of sats being sent around nostr every day, even if the individual sat amounts are small.

Certain parties are disappointed that the value that people voluntarily give to shitposts is marginal because they expected a free and open, decentralized and sovereign system to behave like a permissioned, closed, centrally controlled system.

Platforms have a captive audience they can farm for attention, and that's why large sums of money flow through them. There is no such attention farming capability on nostr. But what I think happened was that people saw how people are manipulated to behave on platforms and assumed that was normal, organic behavior, and that people would behave the same on nostr. I think we proved that isn't the case pretty definitely at this point.

I don't think nostr is by any measure a failure. I think people just had the wrong ideas and expectations about it. Let them wash out, and the ecosystem will adjust.