It's one of the minor-footnote tragedies of the hobby's history that WotC published 4E.
Completely leaving aside my personal feelings for 4E--positive, negative, and/or otherwise--I think this is untrue for at least one major reason.
I don't think 5E would have been quite the phenomenon it was if it hadn't had 4E to, in the eyes of many, "recover from."
(To say nothing of the fact that it wouldn't include many of the innovations that it's borrowed from 4E.)
Just as Pathfinder's success was,
in part, a confluence of events, so too was 5E's. I'm not suggesting that either wouldn't have been a good game, or wouldn't have been successful, but I believe they wouldn't have made as much of a massive initial impact.
And given that 5E, and the activities surrounding it (streaming, mainstream attention, etc.), are largely responsible for the biggest tabletop RPG renaissance since the 80s, I think the hobby is in a better place now than it would've been without the sequence of events--4E and its controversies included--that led to it.
Now, this is all personal theorizing on my part. I don't
know anything more than anyone else who's reasonably tapped into the hobby. But I think it's a reasonable conclusion.