I think HTM was doomed to fail from the very start; even Hawkins has distanced himself from it. The problem is that HTM/TBT all are iterations for a better model of the neocortex. But it would definitely take quite a bit of time to really unlock all the secrets of the brain.

I think Numenta quickly realized that the path forward is going to be even longer than they thought (they've been researching ~20 years now IIRC) so they're wanting to quickly cash out - their whole new push towards "integrating DL" with their ideas (spoiler: doesn't work well, check out their latest paper on that) and working on sparsifying LLMs - something which the NeuralMagic folks already lead quite a huge part of the industry by (see the recent paper: LMs can be pruned in one-shot).

That argument of "If we'd put X resources in Y thing, we'd have solved ASI by now!" is quite illogical and applicable to literally every field. In the end, Numenta's work simply did not yield the results that Hawkins et al. were hoping to get. No results is a very tricky grounding to attract the interests of other researchers. If HTM/TBT wants a comeback, it would have to be on the shoulders of some strong emergent abilities in their architectures...