Yes they were out there and readable by lots of phones in 2010, and very few people used them. They weren't convenient to use and didn't tend to direct you anywhere useful to begin with.

The running joke for a decade (here in the US anyway) was that nobody had ever actually used one.

I've looked into this a couple of years ago and the problem was that you just couldn't assume people would be able to scan a qr code without downloading an extra app.

iPhones could scan them with the default camera app, but on Android it really depended on the manufacturer.

So you couldn't just say: "point your camera app at the code and open the url that appears.", which made using QR codes pretty much useless unless you had an app where you could build in an scanner for these codes.