But honestly, the litigation was a deal killer for many BSD users in the early days,
and that gave Linux room to grow. Had the BSDs not faced the competition from Linux
and had similar resources poured into them, the NetBSD/FreeBSD split would have
been good competition, much as there's good competition between Debian, Redhat, Suse,
Canonical, etc today in the Linux space which helps to drive innovation.

Even today, with the benefit of hindsight, it's hard to pin which of these facts on
the ground was the biggest driver for most people…

I’d had exposure to HP/UX and SunOS at university, and I used Minix (installed from a stack of floppies) on my 80286 PC at home. At some point I accidentally dd’d over the DOS partition, and Minix became my primary OS for a year or so.

I was an avid DDJ reader (RIP) and so I’d seen the 386BSD series, but I couldn’t get a hold of the code for some time. IIRC, my usual method was to FTP each floppy image to my university account (with brutal storage quotas), and then pull it down to my PC to write out locally. I had an early copy of either FreeBSD or NetBSD (can’t recall which), but I think at that stage it demanded complete ownership of the hard disk (and didn’t cope with PC-style MBR partition tables) and I didn’t have a spare HDD to put it on. I also seem to recall some driver issue: I didn’t have a SCSI controller, and I think I recall a problem with my MFM (or was it early IDE) controller?

Linux floppies (MCC? HJ Lu?) were much easier to come by: I borrowed a set from someone, and re-downloaded the corrupt ones, and was able to install Linux beside my existing Minix installation easily. It was very flakey to start with, but in a relatively short time I had X running, and that was the end of Minix for me.

After university, I had jobs and money, and had various Free/Net/OpenBSD machines, but they typically lacked support for some iffy hardware I was using, and fairly quickly *BSD became a second-class platform for stuff like Netscape, and GPU drivers, and so on.

I think a similar pattern was true for many of my era (late 80’s/early 90’s). It was quite a bit easier to get a Linux system running while retaining a DOS, Windows or Minix system as a backup, and so that was how it evolved.