The harsh truth is that up to 90% or even 99% of investors in the market are only interested in profits, not many people care about decentralization and privacy as they claim. That is also why not only XRP but also many other centralized altcoins still exist and continue to grow.
So as long as XRP still has the potential to generate returns there will still be a lot of people investing in it, and it will not disappear or die like many bitcoin maximalists say.
If you are interested not only in bitcoin news but also in news about the entire crypto industry. You will see XRP being the most mentioned name because they have very good relationships with the Trump administration and banking institutions around the world. This means whether we like it or not, the truth is that it will continue to exist over time, regardless it is a centralized shitcoin as we call.
XRP is popular for quite sometime. Even before Trump sworn in as present President of USA, XRP was in news and among top alts. Unlike Bitcoin it's a centralised coin and company behind it is Ripple lab who also holds most of XRP (around 46 billion of these tokens).
One reason why centralised coins get popular is because of the owners behind them. They do constant marketing and keep breaking positive news about the project that helps in increasing the price. That's not the case with Bitcoin. As for over decade and a half Bitcoin is moving forward on it's own, thanks to the support of Bitcoin community.
The comparison of Bitcoin with any centralised coin is not justified because the features provided by Bitcoin are not present in any of centralised coins.