It's pretty common for an "inferior" technology (at least in a certain niche) to win out when there's a monstrous industrial economy of scale behind it and the "superior" alternative isn't produced in much volume.

A very clear example is big complicated general purpose CPUs like Xeon and Ryzen. These chips have all kinds of subsystems and a lot of legacy cruft. A custom chip with a different custom tuned set of performance trade-offs could be better for virtually any well-defined application, but the cost of designing, optimizing, retooling, and producing such a chip would be vastly higher than just buying the off the shelf general purpose chips. Intel and AMD have already invested billions in producing these chips cheaply in enormous quantities.

Li-Ion batteries have endless applications from electronics and cars to grid power, so Li-Ion is going to get the R&D, industrial, and supply chain optimization. Alternatives with fewer niches will not.