Because while the adults are all busy pooh-poohing it, this tech is rapidly penetrating in that market. Which is to say, something like 80% of my kids friends have access to / use VR routinely. And it's 100% Oculus/Meta.
So far I haven't seen a compelling mass market use case outside of games (which is a relatively niche market), but if you open up development tools well I suppose the hope is that someone will come up with something.
Indeed, this is the billion dollar question. It's very clear there are compelling use cases but the really obvious ones are niche industrial uses, commercial applications etc. So the real question is compelling mass market use cases.
The two mass market ones that are apparent at the moment are fitness and virtual office spaces. Fitness is already well on the way, virtual office use is still tenuous and really needs hardware improvements to get off the ground. Those improvements look likely in the next generation of hardware so it's going to be an interesting 24 months to see whether it takes off or not.
The elephant in the room, as you point out, is that neither of these match Faceook's supposed aspiration to create a Metaverse. So I see Facebook/Meta's ultimate success here being dictated heavily by how fast they can get over that and target the real mass market use cases as their primary focus.
This is what FB did during one the Nets games.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq4JMWcnUCw
Just look at the comment and you tell people are interested, If they can improve the quality on this. This will be a huge for sports fans, especially fans in different countries/states that can't go to the games.
Now expand this across music events and other events. You have a massive TAM.
But maybe Zuck knows about some forthcoming propaganda campaign to focus on getting people to use VR to distract from income inequality, putting the majority of the population into the digital world seems like the best way to distract from real world issues