Of course it didn't, it wasn't designed to be either the fastest nor the best. Just OK and simple. Yet in some cases it's not completely overtaken by competition, and I think that's cool.
I don't believe QOI will ever have any sort of real-world practical use, but that's quite OK and I love it for it has made me and plenty of others look into binary file formats and compression and demystify it, and look further into it. I wrote a fully functional streaming codec for QOI, and it has taught me many things, and started me on other projects, either working with more complex file formats or thinking about how to improve upon QOI. I would probably never have gotten to this point if I tried the same thing starting with any other format, as they are at least an order of magnitude more complex, even for the simple ones.
I don't believe QOI will ever have any sort of real-world practical use, but that's quite OK and I love it for it has made me and plenty of others look into binary file formats and compression and demystify it, and look further into it. I wrote a fully functional streaming codec for QOI, and it has taught me many things, and started me on other projects, either working with more complex file formats or thinking about how to improve upon QOI. I would probably never have gotten to this point if I tried the same thing starting with any other format, as they are at least an order of magnitude more complex, even for the simple ones.