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Microsoft stopped investing in it for a time and generally less focus on desktop technologies over the years. It’s still fairly popular in .NET shops as far as I can tell with spiritual successors like Avalonia

XAML is not a learn in a weekend type of deal and most dev don’t want to put the time to reading a proper book to learn it.

When I was last dabbling with WinUI/Win App SDK it honestly never even crossed my mind to read a book, but in retrospect that sounds like a good idea. Figuring out how to do X basic thing in XAML through googling was frustrating largely due to how many different flavors of XAML exist now.

Microsoft's desktop strategy has been a disaster.

If I had to guess? A bad decision and then sunk cost. If for their cross platform story they'd gone the avalonia route and developed cross platform wpf they would have been miles ahead of wherever they are now with their three or four competing underfunded ideas. Then wasm as a target might eventually have even fallen into their laps.

They have good execution in general but their strategy in this space is closer to a "12 startups in 12 months" style approach.