Other companies might have been pushing it but it's all pointless if merchants won't play along. While that part's gotten better, a significant minority will likely never bother with NFC (or at least won't until customers start demanding it far more than they currently are). Not to mention that for many of those merchants, NFC actually requires significant software development on top of whatever's been done for chip since they refuse to use any bank/processor-written software on their terminals.

Also, customers aren't really going to start demanding it in large numbers for a while due to our general extreme distrust of banking technology. (I suspect that's what killed contactless cards here, since they were around back in 2007-2010 or so; the only reason NFC wasn't immediately dismissed this time, IMO, is because authentication is basically mandatory with the phone-based systems.) The question then becomes: how long will the banks wait before concluding that NFC is a success or a failure?

On that note, I'm honestly surprised that the US isn't a predominantly cash-based country like Japan or Germany, though I guess banks did condition us to use cards over a span of decades.