This is accurate. NeXT was sitting right there but Taligent, Pink, and Cairo sucked all the oxygen. It’s kind of funny how NeXT won in the long run by acquiring Apple for a negative 430 million and re-skinning as macOS.
While NeXT wasn't a big commercial success, they were wise to innovate on a boring foundation (Mach/BSD, PostScript, Objective-C) while architecture astronauts working on Taligent, Cairo, and Copland were off reinventing the wheel.