Other things too
The other big problem is actually the commodity hardware. Part of the sales pitch was being able to turn on services as needed....which meant over-provisioning. The reality was that customers rarely turned on new services. That meant a lot of horsepower sitting unused in the field, raising operator costs with no real way to recoup.
On top of that, many of the more proprietary CPE are...actually not that expensive. Add on your excellent points about single-pane-of-glass management and cloudification.....well NFV is essentially dead.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
