In any case, the main issue of these platforms is a bit like explaining monads and other complicated stuff.
To really get the point of how those systems work, a person needs to invest time into the system until it clicks, and no matter how much we try to put the experience into words, there is only so much the audience is able to grasp, assuming it actually cares to pay attention to.
imo, the Self/Smalltalk vision was just hard to sell to people in the 80s/90s since it was so ahead of its time, with no easy bridge back to the world people were building their existing software in. It might even be hard to sell it today. People built their apps with an existing toolchain and a language they already knew. To adopt the Self/Smalltalk vision largely meant ditching all that to replace your language, your OS, and your toolchain at the same time, for a bet on the claim that a dynamic language was somehow fast enough.
Instead, we piecemeal evolved into a worse world where Javascript apps run in a worse OS (the browser) and Python apps run in a lower level OS that needs to transport itself in a worse image model (Docker). But, it was easier to adopt from what came before. I can't say I'm happy about it, but at least the vision of Self and Smalltalk caught on.
I used Smalltalk/V for some university projects and then there was Visual Age for Smalltalk.
However then Java happened and most of the vendors pivoted into it.
I still switch to the Smalltalk like browser on Eclipse from time to time.