Yeah in my opinion him pushing so hard for GearVR seriously negatively impacted the industry. Tons of people had their first intro to VR be some crappy 360 video on mobile VR and it did lasting damage to society's perception of VR
Ok then crappy 3dof VR on mobile, of which GearVR was a variety. Bottom line, Facebook/Carmack pushed mobile vr prematurely in order to get the most users possible, but the experience sucked and users lost interest. Meta just made the same mistake with horizon
From the text it seems that mobile is not the issue "5% GPU utilization" screams of seriously large problems on the CPU side. What where they writing their software with? CPython, an interpreter only JavaScript runtime?
Also the current generation of VR was basically build on top of smartphone hardware and there where quite a few ideas to make use of the full hardware instead of using it as a dumb display.
