Had Kubernetes not existed they would be doing just fine economically as they would be the dominant platform.
They got beat by competition.
Yep I agree. I recently helped a customer to move from Docker EE to OpenShift. They were frank about the pain points they experienced and why they were moving. It really came down to competition. K8s solves the problems they were having in a better way. Now with so much momentum behind K8s, nearly everybody is re-platforming their offerings on top of K8s.
By the way, it's "per se"
Docker allowed reproducibility to be accomplished by a person who likes the idea of it, but will shelve it if it doesn't work within an evening. This describes me, for example. I think it took off for that reason.
They also benefited significantly from the splash they made and the tech excitement factor. I still run into people in my consulting work that are fairly new to containers, but brand recognition on Docker is through the roof. Everybody has heard of them even if they don't know what it can do for them.