The reason why these things don't take off with non-nerds is because the UI and UX of open source tools almost always sucks. That's it. There's nothing more to it.
Over the weekend there was a post about XMPP and somebody asked for a client with the same level of UX as Telegram. There were a few replies, but none of them were what I would say were anywhere near the same level.
For example one of them had an option to choose between three different methods of encrypting chats, and it was one of the most prominent UI features in the chat window. That's great if you want to feel like James Bond and encrypted chat is your main use case, but 99.9% of people are just sending memes and photos of their cats and don't even know what encrypted means.
Element is doing quite well in this department, but last time I tried (admitidely a couple of years ago) there were still some edge cases.