the team behind remix probably has the biggest following in the react scene, so even without having any major differentiation (though I happen to think they do have) it's going to gain popularity.
That being said I see no reason to not welcome another competitor in this space... and it's free. I'm sure you are right and this will gain popularity, though the competition is stiff.
I rarely check twitter but yesteday's Kent Dodds message section about a tweet announcing Remix's launch made me cringe.
Guillermo Rauch (main dude behind Next and Vercel) was well known in the scene before next which also helped it gain the initial traction to build upon.
Feels like a similar case. IIRC remix wasn't suppose to be open source, but feels like nowadays it's a better choice for them to go the Next route and build services around their framework.
My bet is they'll build a Cloudflare Edge Suite abstraction (or even get bought by CF for their edge offerings)
Is Kent also a person behind remix now? It used to be just Michael and Ryan, best known in the react space for react-router, and in the frontend ecosystem more generally for unpkg (Michael).
UPDATED: oh, I just found his tweet about him joining the Remix team.