The whole point of monero is privacy, and in the day and age where people are not caring about their privacy, that means that asking people to work a lot more to get monero in exchange of something they do not even want was the real reason why it never got any big attention. Maybe some people will disagree with me, but the results are the proof of this already anyway.
I agree with you, many people don't care about privacy and don't care about coin that's the main goal is privacy, Until the government limited that, they just realized that Monero important and started thinking to having one. But a bit too late because the price has increased many times. There are many exchanges which makes it easy to exchange btc to monero quickly wihout create account or login. I think it's not a big problem. but, i don't know why until today, there are still many who don't care about that even the goverment Banned crypto and blacklisted it.