It's easy to avoid the patents by waiting for them to expire. This is the traditional way of doing things, and is why there are so many instances of technologies not becoming commonplace until 20 years or so after they are patented.
We're still in the competition for the leading XR ecosystem. If a company wants to establish themselves in this space, "just wait" is not an option. Quite the opposite, now there's still a chance to shake-up everything by delivering a strong user-experience
I played about 300 hours of VR, then moved somewhere that didn’t have the space, and I haven’t ever felt the desire to play VR since. Regular PC games are just as fun if not more so.
Required physical space and overall utilization are commercially limiting factors, achieving the required level of "presence" (which is beyond immersion) is still a major technical hurdle.
After all, the human brain is preconditioned to detect if something is "off", VR needs to achieve a level of performance that doesn't trigger any of this senses.
AR on the other hand has none of the above limitations. It's comparatively easy to develop a good experience there, and much more simple to develop applications once a strong ecosystem is in place. AND it contributes heavily to the VR-evolution as well.
If XR will disrupt in this "round", expect VR to evolve slowly until AR has appeared and scaled. Without AR fueling it, VR won't be able to accelerate in evolution and affordability.
Companies invested billions in tackling all those fundamental technology limitations (reduce motion-to-photon latency, higher refresh-rates, global refresh, lower pixel-persistence,...).
The dilemma is, that in VR everything "sucks" until you achieve presence (the feeling of really being somewhere else) or at least full immersion.
So how do you fund all this development? By releasing iterative products which sadly harm the wide adoption more than they help, because "it still sucks".
At best, VR drove mass-production of necessary technology in other industries (i.e. adoption of >60Hz displays, high-resolution sensors, eye-tracking, OLED, immersive audio,...), which ultimately helps the next entrant to create a more-affordable AR/VR-device.
At the very least, it created IP that this "somebody sometime" will then have to license. I doubt it will be possible to create a new VR-device without the patents of Sony, Microsoft or Samsung.
How much this helps to really innovate is another question, arguably it means Apple is the only new entrant large enough to cross-license and still disrupt...