Not to sound like a conspiracy breh, but you know, the fact that COVID made everyone (or at least most people) stay at home for quite some time allowed for something like this to occur. With everyone's eyes on the internet now, a lot of these ideas are able to gain steam. Before, most people would say "Why would I use the Metaverse or VR for events when I can just go in person?
" Now it's more accepted because people can't be out and about as usual if COVID is an issue. And if we're eventually going to "live with COVID"... I suppose this is one possible avenue of the world doing so.
Food delivery services were known prior to 2020 and were used often, but those businesses must've had a HUGE boom in service and revenue once March-April 2020 came. Then cyptocurrency was introduced into the mainstream last year after the GameStop stuff happened. After that, businesses started introducing NFTs. And while many people dislike the concept due to environmental issues and no real obvious gain to them owning it, all of this technology is here to stay.
Once it's affordable and most businesses jump into the VR game, it'll be the new frontier for everyone. It probably won't be for a good while though, so there's plenty of time for people to get warmed up to the idea and companies to make platforms that utilize this properly. Think about the amount of virtual concerts that could start happening, movie premieres, sports games... Blockchain technology might be the start of all of this. But, they need to find an eco-friendly way to manage and maintain all of this, otherwise people will not only reject it, but we're going to continue facing climate change issues without proper solutions.