Absolutely! From trust-minimized BTC bridging with BitVM to more scalable and private multisig with FROST and MuSig2, Taproot has given us some really great improvements.
Everything is good for Bitcoin in the context of learning and failing forward... perhaps the question then isn't optimally worded. Was it a failure or a triumph?
"It's bad but could have been worse and now we know should know better" is just a positive interpretation of failure.
There's been 0 benefit to Bitcoin's value prop as money.
All it has achieved is giving ethead adjacent/script kiddies a morale boost via precedent, such that they'll be able to continue pushing to make Bitcoin more like Ethereum. Incentives for development have completely shifted to pet-usecase centralized application stacks.
Abject disaster.
Nobody voting yes is actually keeping a meaningful amount of Bitcoin in a Taproot address, can all but guarantee they're bandwagon jumping hypocrites.
... Or even a material amount across all addresses total.
Proponents would seem to be either afraid of using it, or lied about their urgent use-cases all along.
On a purely relative basis, a proponents burden of proof is that they're no less "safe" than address types with a longer track record... But they won't put any skin in the game on their experiment.
Privacy is paradoxical, so I don't think anything should ever tout privacy as a feature or benefit, it should be incidental to something superior for its own reasons.
Things like Monero and Tor for example, privacy is the feature benefit, but that also makes them less private because it attracts a smaller anonset (retards) because they're otherwise useless, and more relative surveillance because it's a honeypot/target rich with said retards.
Privacy as a feature also leads users to stray from privacy practices due to a false sense of security. These undiscerning users fulfill the paradox of deanonymizing private systems through improper practices.
Taproot channels are often cited as a benefit to Lightning, but to your point nobody cares so use is negligible... and if we did get a flood of new privacy focused users, they'd quickly deanonymize an otherwise private network today through centralized swap services and ignorance of utxo management.