There's a few things that work against the CVT in the eyes of car owners despite what positives a well-sorted CVT can bring to the table.
Historically speaking*, CVTs have been a joke when it comes to reliability in automobiles. Nissan was the first (2006) to really go big with them and put it in a mass-produced car for the North American market and the transmissions they were sourcing weren't great, to put it lightly. It took a long time (2014ish) for really reliable CVTs to hit the market with Toyota and Honda, but by that point, there had been a lot of burnt bridges because of just how bad the JATCO CVT was, which by this point was in Nissan, Mitsu, and other smaller OEs.
CVTs generally aren't rebuildable, and are more expensive than their traditional automatic counterparts. This is problematic when you consider the higher-than-normal failure rates of early CVTs.
CVTs aren't fun. Look no further than the Nissan Maxima, which was billed as really the first four door sports car from the early '90's to early 2000's. Those were great cars- practical but with good power and good handling. The Maxima was one of the first that Nissan put a CVT into and it turned people off. It was too different, and too numbing.
CVTs have little room for error in the eyes of the car buying public now. Perception goes a long ways and issues tend to stand out more to potential car buyers than the positives a car has to offer.
Ultimately, I think that had automakers (looking at you, Nissan) waited to make sure that the CVT would've been a more robust unit, you wouldn't see as much derision towards them today. Like has been pointed out, they do offer a lot of benefits- more time spent in the power band, more compact, slight increases in fuel efficiency, etc.
*I understand Nissan wasn't the first with the CVT- Subaru had one in the late '80s, Audi put them in some A4s in the early '00s, etc etc.
