Yes, you can say we "gave up" on that market segment, but you're missing the point. Bitcoin is no longer an experimental sandbox where you can just introduce any feature without testing it first. It is a mission-critical program now, so if even the slightest error is introduced, it will wreak unimagineable havoc on people's life savings...

This testing requires almost-scientific observation of the feature's behavior in real-world conditions. Altcoins volunteered to be test beds so we are watching how its behaving.

Let's take smart contracts for example (NFTs and tokens are just specific types of smart contracts so the same reasoning that will follow also applies to these technologies).

This is a technology that replaces the script interpreter with a programming language. It also means that its just as possible to accidentially introduce bugs in the smart contracts which can't be recitified without possible fund loss.

History way before bitcoin has shown us that programmers can be quite sloppy, even on mission-critical systems, and Solidity and other smart contract langs are no exception. People will still make bugs by accident because its human nature.

Even worse, because of the very nature of the applications that use it, all bugs are now upgraded to security vulnerability status because even the smallest bug can allow for theft. Take nation states like North Korea for example, who think that anything inside a smart contract is their personal treasury.

Years ago, people observed exactly this on Ethereum, and then thought: Is it really worth the risk to implement it just for market share? Accordingly, the answer they arrived to was: No.

Observing new features getting trialed in altcoins is a common way for people do discern how well this would work out for Bitcoin. In a majority of these trails, the results are very poor and indicate failure, because no design is fool-proof, not even the ones in Bitcoin.

Like I said, it's not foolproof, but this scientific method allows us to immediately throw out the ideas that will never work on Bitcoin.