This article's tone and framing is negative and about failure, but imho this is just a weird capitalist winner-take-all notion of success. The numbers in the article show that millions of units were shipped and you can pretty clearly infer that tens of millions of children had access to a computer they otherwise wouldn't have. As someone who's childhood access to an apple2e was a massive privilege and advantage, I know damn well if I was one of those tens of millions of kids I'd be better off for it.
So this "failure" seems to have helped millions, learned a bunch and developed some OSS. I should hope to fail so hard myself someday.