To download Delphi "Community Edition" I need to provide: name, email address, country, phone number and a company name. I can also use it only if I agree with their terms (understandable-ish, every license is like this). So how can anyone expect people to use it when even if you just want to try it out you have to register somewhere.
Yeah that's another side, Delphi's never been good at entry-level stuff. Back in the days the only way to get a cheap copy was to be a student. Now there's the "Community Edition" but as you say, compared to other options it's pretty high-friction.
This combined with the years of subpar evolution due to poor management certainly did not help Delphi.
Community edition was 32-bit, was missing design-time and had strange constraints for compiling. It is essentially and unusable, stripped down version of Delphi that you can look at, but not use.
