I don't think there that many users on Nostr as a whole to begin with though

Reason 2 is key, nostr is not app, its architecture protocol. Handling user posts, likes comments and all are very easy to manage in centralized database and server, here architecture of relays is not centralized. On such protocol its very hard to manage that. And when we dont have ads on the platfo...

By the way you are completely wrong on that nostr has bad apps. Yakihone is pretty much solid.