Apple management started talking about cutting it pretty much immediately. It didn't directly generate any revenue--Apple gave it away for free. It didn't fit into any familiar product category. It wasn't on anybody's list of must-have features. Basically, Apple management didn't understand what it was or why it existed.
Apple's programmers and other makers were an entirely different matter. They used it for all sorts of things. So did third-party developers. So did people who discovered how to make software through working with HyperCard. Projects sprouted in Apple that either extended HyperCard or implemented new software in the same spirit with expanded capabilities--but all those projects had the same problem as HyperCard: management didn't see what they were supposed to be for. Furthermore, the other projects didn't benefit from Apple management's promise to Bill Atkinson that HyperCard would be given away to Apple customers.
HyperCard's days were numbered from the beginning; that much is true. But to call it "obsolete" from the beginning misunderstands a lot.
Re. not requiring a tithe to Apple, it's significant that their most popular OS (by orders of magnitude?):
* requires a tithe
* is not user programmable
That definitely was not the case at the time HyperCard was being developed. I know because I was there. I even worked on the HyperCard team for a while.
HyperCard's troubles had nothing to do with an Apple policy against user programmability, and everything to do with the fact that management couldn't figure out how to make it into a product that paid for itself.
If you want to argue that Apple has a policy against user programming now, well, maybe they do. I don't know. The last time I worked there was in the 1990s. But they didn't have any such policy when HyperCard was being shipped.
HyperCard development floundered before Steve came back partly because of bad management decisions and partly because it required a total ground-up rewrite to bring it up to even 1988's graphic standards (it was obsolete pretty much as soon as it was released, thanks to the appearance of the Macintosh II, which supported larger screens and RGB color).