Part of the difficulty was that when starting off early EV adopters already had charging infrastructure in their homes the same isn't true for hydrogen. Tesla later was able to build and expand superchargers, but initially people just charged at home (and still mostly do except for longer trips).

There isn't a path for hydrogen to build out like that - you need the entire infrastructure at once, there isn't a real path to success there. Failure was obvious imo based on this alone (there are other issues too).

I'm not even sure Toyota really expected anything other than failure? Based on the attention they gave it, it mostly seemed like something they could point to for marketing and then ignore with some justification that their own failure is evidence people don't want non-gasoline alternatives.