(Or to summarise the situation in another way, it got mercilessly shunned in terms of wider community enthusiasm versus Rust)
The real story of server side Swift is a small but dedicated working group [0] continuing to make real measurable progress. Most of the frameworks have fallen out of favor or have been abandoned, except for Vapor, but the workgroup is active with representatives from several major tech companies. Obviously the workgroup's scope is much broader than just a single framework, and their current initiatives identify and address most of the shortcomings noted in the article. [1]
A supposedly wise man once said "...you can not fool all of the people all of the time." [0] Plenty of things that are usable are also failures (e.g. Microsoft Zune was, by all accounts, a competent media device). Any technology that is not winning [sufficient] mindshare over time will be considered a failure soon enough.
[0] What, you don't know who said this? Copy pasta plus a three-second search on any search site or AI chat will set you straight.
Defining "sufficient" here is important, and I think that server side Swift's progress meets a bar here that prevents it from being a failure. That might not last though.
The Swift FOSS folks are the ones that have tried to look into it, as there is hardly any other use case outside Apple's ecosystem.
I believe most end up learning this either the hard way or by simple observation ; and one cannot come to any other conclusion than avoid Apple stuff outside of Apple hardware...
I am reminded of the Black Mirror episode "Arkangel". Children are their own people, they're meant to go into the world and be themselves. A programming language isn't a person but its destiny is distinct from yours, and it deserves the opportunity to be its own thing and develop without you hovering over it constantly.
That's some A-tier manipulation tactics.
(Casca in Julius Caesar, however the play is in this case describing an event actually mentioned in Plutarch)