Not entirely self-evidently. Position independent code was slower at the time and avoiding having to patching function addresses at load time is a net win.

More importantly, there’s backwards compatibility. By the time the 8086 came out, people had spent serious money on getting binary-only software (WordStar cost hundreds of dollars, for example). “Buy this computer, and you can keep running the software you paid for, but faster” was a good selling point.