You making a living off this doesn't invalidate the fact that VR is having a hard time catching on.

I'm a biased observer, sure. But I feel very confident in saying that VR is never ever going away, let alone already dead like OP was saying, or even remotely comparable to 3D TV.

It's not (as it stands) going to be adopted as the media-platform of choice for consuming mass amounts of netflix and marvel movies, but there's way more niches to make it a viable go-to solution for many problems.

Is the video still produced as ordinary 2d/planar video? It's just projected as 360? Or is there some kind of depth information? What makes it so compelling?

Most of our video is rendered down to ordinary video that gets reprojected, driven mostly by a requirement to be able to be played back on lowest-common-denominator hardware and platforms; nothing near as cool as what Carmack's article details. But there's other problems that require fun solutions to, too.

I’m curious: what company/industry are you with and what tech are you using specifically?

I work alongside civil/acoustic/hydraulic engineers. We use a whole bunch of tools for various productions, but I spend most of my time in 3DSMAX, Unreal Engine and Visual Studio.

Selling 3d TV to stores was briefly popular too but that dried up once the stores discovered that they were having a hard time selling them.

That doesn't validate it for users though, only that other businesses believe it has traction and value.