The social utility of a given software package is not necessarily tied to mass-market adoption. A software package can be trendy in a tight-knit community, while holding very little social utility for the mass market, and this is fine. This is the case for most software packages that exist in the world.

If a FLOSS matches the need for a small part of the community, it is then fine too !

Unfortunately, society teaches us that we should grow at any cost, which means that inexperienced maintainers can be swayed by such arguments to make harmful decisions about their projects.

The sucess of a project is measured by the biggest number: the number of stars on GitHub, amount of forks, ...