I think what they're saying is that most people liked the OS itself, but didn't like the lack of apps, which is what ultimately killed it.

A lot of great products beloved by a lot of people fail in the market despite their quality for all kinds of reasons.

In this case, the lateness of the product, the continual burning of their phone platforms, anticompetitive behavior of Google and some of its associated companies, carrier disinterest, and a lackluster marketing campaign are among the reasons it failed.

I doubt you will find many people who tried or used the phone who didn’t like it.

Not necessarily, it was the best OS in the later revisions, but too late. Ecosystem with apps lacked behind- that's the reason it didnt succeed.

No, it wasn't. I have one with WP10. They at some point killed external storage as well and I couldn't fit 120GB of HERE maps data to my main storage, which killed the only reason I was still using it.