I'm too young to be any kind of oracle on IE and it's history, however I'm personally glad that IE was already fading away by the time I began my software engineering career. This is because, from the stories I've heard from older colleagues, IE rapidly turned into another loser EEE Microsoft boondoggle; trying to own the ecosystem and crush competition by:

1. Moving standards so fast, so randomly, and so opaquely, that nobody can keep up.

2. Abusing market share and WinOS (then sued for it)

3. Etc...

In my eyes, IE was never going to recover from all of that bad blood. It was ill-fated and doomed to die once greed took a hold.