Some of why it "lost out" just seems that it was a proprietary technology carefully guarded with a rather low "bus factor". Blue/Green screens and chroma-keying

Some of why it "lost out" just seems that it was a proprietary technology carefully guarded with a rather low "bus factor". Blue/Green screens and chroma-keying have been "common knowledge" for a long time, with a lot of implementations over decades, but the sodium vapor process was a more closely held secret because it was a competitive advantage. Fewer people knew how to do it. Fewer people had access to do it. Eventually those people passed on or retired and the industry "forgot" how to do it entirely. It may have been "lost" simply because not enough people were allowed to know how it worked or have access to recreating it. I think there are a lot of analogies here to find related to the software industry, such as the relationships between closed source and open source software.