Are you reading this chart the same way I am? 5 years ago there was about 4.1k transactions per day and now its about 26k transaction per day... That's an increase of over 5x. I'd say that definitely suggests adoption is occurring.
Node count isn't a very reliable measure because you can cherry pick whichever source is more favorable to your argument.
MoneroHash says Monero has 3k nodes while
Monero.Fail says it's 22k.
These websites are counting different things: the first is active (currently reachable) nodes, the second is total nodes seen within the last 2 weeks.