maybe all that blather about "the long tail" in the late 90s was halfway correct. the intarwebs allow relatively small communities of people who are interested in a particular thing to do that particular thing. But a small percentage of a very large number can still be large.
if 99.9% of people don't want the hassle of maintaining an alternative identity online, that's fine. but that still means that 0.1% of people do.
if your critique is "the metaverse is laughable because the majority of people don't participate in it" you may be missing the point. if your critique is "it's entirely possible meta over-estimated interest in the metaverse," then i heartily agree.
i think second-life-like online experiences are useful, but they seem to have been over-hyped (to say the least.)