Many languages are in use for different things without the need for a language to win. It is a bit anthropomorphic to approach tools like that IMO.
Instead, there has been a healthy influence of more research FP languages into mainstream languages (as you mention), more interesting experimental languages, etc. Aka everything working as intended.
Insofar as it didn't prevent the good parts of FP to become mainstream features, I agree.
But the popularity contest IS important for language emergence. I still believe there would be a place for a functional language that strives to adhere to the principles more stricly, and that programming could benefit from such a language gaining a lot of traction. But, as mentioned before, if such a language requires people to deal with a very different syntax, or applies it's principles too rigidly, it will likely fail the popularity contest.
It also is important for paradigms to become pervasive. As I mentioned, FP has a lot to teach even to OOP people. Writing functional code is a great way to organise a program.
But tell that to a young software developer who has only ever been served enterprise spaghetti OOP pasta with extra abstraction sauce garnished with pseudo-encapsulation cheese, and for whom "functional programming" is something he only saw ridiculed as a meme on some subreddits.
No, popularity isn't the only important thing. But it can help things to reach their potential.
So maybe it's time for FP as a whole to accept the fact, that there seems to be something fundamental about the way it's paraded implementations look and feel like, that puts off a lot of programmers.
Maybe it's time for FP to accept that the paradigm as a whole has a lot to contribute that is useful to everyone, but doesn't need a new language with largely different syntactic constructs to do so.