“Manuals are great until you get stuck in a slow moving stop and go traffic jam. “
that’s what killed them.
There was actually an uptick in manual sales during the peak work from home covid, but has faded.
Manual transmission sales didn’t drop because of traffic jams, they declined because most cars now are first leased and the finance companies found it much easier to sell the car at the end of the lease if it had an automatic transmission.