May see rings around Earth again.. it's the expected state that space debris settles into after Kessler Syndrome.
It makes sense for the vast majority of people to prefer that against the slight inconvenience in editing out satellite tracks faced by a tiny tiny community of ground bases astrophotographers.
GEO satellites are pretty pricey. Each Milstar satellite cost $800 million, others in the same category are also in the hundreds of millions, WGS-11 was over $600 million. Starlink V2 cost $800k per satellite.
And if you spent $800 million on a constellation of 1000 Starlinks, you'd have better coverage and bandwidth than the entire 6 satellite Milstar constellation put together for 1/6th the price.
Digging around for more recent prices, GEO is around $100-300 million. That's still orders of magnitude more per satellite than LEO. At the low end this means you could get 100-400 Starlink V2s up there for the price of one GEO. One GEO that only covers part of the globe, versus 100-400 satellites providing global coverage.
I might be able to get a message off, but how the hell do you contact the emergency services and who the hell is going to rescue me in a country with one rescue helicopter that was out of action at the time?
In circumstances like that it's better to actually get some mountain safety training, have some procedures and other comms equipment in place. And importantly travel in a group with the right equipment (including 4 legged transport devices).
As for the astrophotography that was opportunistic.
And while they might not send a helicopter, a team if rescuers on foot can still help in most cases.
You'll find some places have only voluntary services and the phone is likely only manned on week days on limited hours. If you're lucky there might be a gmail address you can hit. No joke.
Once satellite communication is truly accessible to everyone, I expect other companies to compete in this area.