One thing to keep in mind is that it's not even a very good mesh network.

There's a Zero Retries article recently with a critical review of meshtastic. Or find my comments on meshtastic here.

If anything they showed there's demand for a public mesh. Unfortunately, they didn't want to learn from AlohaNet or any of the other meshes.

You’re understating it. Meshtastic is horribly designed. If you designed a wireless mesh network making all the worst possible choices, with the most shortsighted design decisions imaginable, you’d get something a little better than Meshtastic.