It died because to make games fit on discs/media they need to be compact making it very hard to ship a limited version without shipping all content. Back in the days generally all the “try before you buy” games shipped the full content leading to cracks that simply unlocked it.
Today a company that doesn’t have a hard-on for DRM could of course run with the model and just chalk up piracy to advertisment and people that wouldn’t buy the game anyway. Kinda like any company selling on GOG.
Of course those are the minority, most companies want / need DRM in some form and the model just works against it. It might be possible to make it work with something like Denuvo but I doubt anyone would be happy about that.