My best guess: I'm bad at marketing, and gave up too soon. The feedback I received was generally "Why would I use this when Pip, Pipenv and Poetry work fine?". To me they didn't; they were a hassle due to not handling venvs and Py versions, but I didn't find many people to also have had the same problem.

Polish and that uv gets you entire python interpreters automatically without having to compile or manually install them.

That in retrospective was what made rye temporarily attractive and popular.