AT&T demonstrated a videophone at the World’s Fair in 1964, a booth where visitors could see and be seen by someone in another city, and the company spent the following decade trying to sell the idea commercially before quietly giving up. The hardware existed. Almost nobody wanted to pay for it, and those who did mostly found the experience stilted and not worth the cost of the dedicated line it required.
Something close to that same promise now runs for free inside software millions of people already have open, on a laptop most of them already own, over an internet connection they were already paying for anyway, and it has quietly become a normal way for people to talk to family overseas.
I don’t think the difference is that video calling got better as a piece of engineering, though the compression has genuinely improved. It is that every piece of the cost structure that killed the original version has disappeared. No dedicated line, no dedicated device bought specifically for this one purpose, no per-minute charge attached to the call. The camera was already sitting on top of the screen for something else entirely. The bandwidth was already being paid for to do everything else people do online.
Removing the cost did more for adoption than forty years of engineering improvements to picture quality managed to do, and I think that is a pattern worth remembering the next time some genuinely impressive piece of technology fails commercially for reasons that have nothing to do with whether it works.
What still holds it back from becoming a true daily habit, rather than an occasional event, is the coordination problem, not the technology. A phone call requires only that the other person answers. A video call still requires both parties to be at a machine with a working camera, sitting somewhere presentable, at a mutually convenient moment, which is a meaningfully higher bar than picking up a handset, and I suspect that gap is what keeps this an occasional pleasure rather than the default way people talk, regardless of how good the picture gets from here.