That is correct, but "nobody was asking for stickers" isn't, and that sort of thing does dramatically affect adoption. Also, in the cases I am talking about, not using an app because it doesn't have a feature technically does mean they didn't request the feature, but I'm not sure that is a useful distinction if our goal is to get people to use more secure methods of communication.
I really can't buy the proposition that demand for stickers outweighed the years-long pain points about things like your Signal identity being tied to your phone number or a ping going out to everyone in a person's address book who already used signal, both of which are at odds with the core mission of secure and private communications.