Then it was assumed that GPU mining would be dead since ASICs came out and then Litecoin came out with Scrypt which was only possible to mine with GPUs.
Then Litecoin got ASICs and it was the entire cycle all over again with ETH.
In fact, the anti-ASIC Litecoin direct successor was not Ethereum but Vertcoin
(launched in January 2014, while Ethereum was launched ~1.5 year later)
btw, it looks like new algo aka Verthash - may have a similar characteristic to ethash (ie. "AMD friendly"):
https://old.reddit.com/r/vertcoin/comments/cl2ske/verthash_is_near_to_the_final_version/