> But then, there also weren't many (public) websites that I ever ran into that wanted to use it.

As I understand it there were weird pockets where organisations went hard in to activeX. IIRC it was used heavily by the South Korean government, and a lot of internal corporate intranet projects for all sorts of things.

That obviously caused massive problems a few years later when Microsoft tried to discontinue activex and make IE/Edge a normal web browser.