It's more accurate to say it hadn't really come alive yet.

But still as late as 96, 97, 98 you could still find job postings advertising for Smalltalk developers. I know, because early-20s me really wanted to do be doing that, but I wasn't qualified.

Within a few years Smalltalk had vanished from the few industry pockets it had, and was replaced by Java in most cases.

Fun fact: I know one company in Russia which built aerospace-grade product in Smalltalk as late as 2010s. I don't know, maybe they still use it right now, maybe it had been replaced, all my friends in this company changed job in last 10 years.