Operators charged per MMS sent. And MMSes were much more expensive than SMSes. I was a student back then and won an early premium Nokia phone with camera in a competition. It was cool for taking pictures for my own use. But I literally knew no one who had a phone that could receive MMSes, and even if I had known, I definitely saw it only as a trap to getting ripped off by the mobile operator.

The camera quality was of course terrible compared to modern standards, but under good lighting conditions it was still acceptable. But I ended up selling the phone (for beer money) on eBay in short order while it was still "like new".

MMS was kinda popular around here when picture phones and the first weird meme videos became popular. Pretty sure most of the time our teen prepaid contracts contained a few free mms and receiving was free with the SIM I had.