It should be pointed out that Iridium (post-bankruptcy) became profitable and has recently finished launching their entire second-generation constellation (on Falcon 9). Their subscriber base continues to grow.
In sparsely populated areas where the service could be valuable, I think they can get away with a lot more (as far as frequency usage) than they could for mobile in dense areas. So I think it could indeed be useful.
https://www.amazon.com/Eccentric-Orbits-Iridium-John-Bloom/d...
Of course this is all speculations, but it has a lot of potential.
A large percentage of those terrestrial base stations were built and sold by Motorola; they did pretty well overall. During that period of time, Motorola had low base station market share in the US and Europe - almost all of their business was in the locations that Iridium was built to serve.
The experience in designing, building and maintaining a large array of satellites (in Arizona, I think) most likely paid for itself in government contracts many times over.
It's perhaps a big deal if you're a Yak farmer in remote Sibera and don't normally have any kind of coverage at all, but most people have some sort of cell coverage that provides at least SMS.
The comment that the bulky handset killed Iridium is only part of the picture. The bigger issue is that terrestrial cell antennas went up faster than Motorola expected, and by the time the system was online its primary use case had already largely vanished, especially among the kind of people who could afford the extremely high fees for the service. In the end the market niche closed down to government people in extremely remote locations who don't already have some sort of satellite connection.