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> ... it didn't "die" in the sense that we gave up on it ...

It died in the sense that the "people in charge" hired us for our expertise and then ignored our every suggestion and fought us tooth and nail every inch of the way when we suggested that security or reliability ever mattered in the slightest until after the disaster happened, and then straight-up scapegoated us for "not pushing back harder" against the threats of "go work somewhere else then, code-monkey!" until we gave up and did the "code-monkey" thing for our paycheck and no longer cared about quality or "a job well done".

It died because personal computers got too powerful so nobody bothered designing and building “true” multiuser systems (that bored college students were trying to break).