And it went in when it did because Redhat was pushing for it and claiming to be supportive - but that never materialized. They wanted to get something for free without investing, or putting in the absolute bare minimum.
A _lot_ of people were saying publicly and privately "dear god yes we need something better than btrfs" - but no one from the existing kernel community was interested in stepping up.
Community's still growing, though. A lot of people have gotten active in making sure bcachefs actually works well for people end to end, and there's a hell of a lot more to shipping a filesystem than just writing kernel code.