Wiimote was a grand success and today's VR controllers are pretty much following its principles with modern technology though so, it was right to be said at the time. Hell, Nintendo shot itself in the foot when it didn't follow it up with an upgrade and focused elsewhere with the WiiU.
But nah, I don't think many folks said it about Kinect, the failure was visible early on for anyone who wasn't drinking the PR kool aid and just looking at things from a more objective gaming standpoint like VR advocates are doing these days
Also Kinect didn't even work as advertised with fake demos, but (good) VR does work even better than is conveyed in media, lol. Off topic but I'm sure we'll see more Kinect-like but actually working tech eventually, there are cool fine movement hand tracking technologies being worked on.
More great VR games are getting made all the time, of course a first party offering VR will also have to provide some great games with it to show people what it does, nobody's saying to just dump hardware on people without games that use it so, uh?
PSVR in its current lackluster and oudated tech-wise (I don't mean visually, just as you can play modern console/PC games in lower than 4K fine, I mean the playability of its controllers) iteration doing well even without a made for VR first party AAA game only highlights the growth potential.