I would be very surprised. Smart phones satisfied an important infrastructure need. Internet was becoming universal in developed countries as an important part of both business and social life, but because of its inconvenience, people necessarily had to either be out or be online.
I agree to a point, and it's slightly chicken-or-the-egg, but I think that there was at least an equal amount of push from the smartphone as there was from society.
Looking back on it now, we can't imagine why you wouldn't want internet in your pocket, but at the time (when the iphone first released) there wasn't a whole lot you could do on it. Maps wasn't really a thing (it was there, but rubbish), email was mostly for business (or at least certainly not for fast time comms) and there was no social media really. I remember when they first came out I just didn't really see the need - the need came after, driven by the addition of services due to the iphone becoming so pervasive. It was similarly expensive to VR, and before it came out smartphones were seen very much as niche.
Just the same way as currently VR seems a bit needless currently for the average consumer, a 'just works' product may well change it to 'well of course you need VR, how are you going to do VR meetings/SkypeVR/TripAdvisorVR etc without it?'.
That may be your experience with it, but lots of people were already using the internet heavily. As I said, social media use wasn't universal, but loads of people were already using things like forums and message boards, and AOL Instant Messenger was incredibly popular among young people for aa decade before the iPhone existed, as were online games (remeber NeoPets?) or even fusions of the two (like Gaia Online). Indeed, the convenience of smartphones allowed it to grow, as I already said, but it was already big with young people, even though many specific companies didn't survive the transition. Although the big names in information, like Google and Wikipedia, did fine. Of course, these things exist for VR too, but VR makes them less convenient, not more.
They are necessary for a societal change that was already well on the way to happening.
I think there's a similar societal change as a use case for VR - so many people are connecting connecting virtually and internationally, and we've about reached the bounds of how 'connected' we can get via just video and voice. So many people work/live away from their families, and so many people have friends internationally in a way that wasn't a thing before. People will want to connect with these people better, and the only way to really do that is VR.
So you think a whole industry will thrive on the back of super-skype functionality, despite the fact that the most prolific users now text far more than they call and don't use current Skype (and competitor) software?
It's not a perfect analogy, and I doubt we'll ever get the same perfect storm as the iphone (with the hordes of adoring apple fans ready to buy it) but I think we may get a smaller version of that revolution if a really good product comes out that 'just works'.
The revolution you're describing could at its very most be the hot gift item one Christmas, like hover boards. The fact is, VR trades in convenience for luxury, and that's inherent. Even the perfect "just works" VR occupies your whole face and restricts your vision artificially. That means even if there were some reason most people would want it (VRchat and video games aren't going to cut it as anything beyond a niche market) it's going to be a hard sell. And there is no reason most people would want it.
As cool as cyberpunk images of everyone being VR junkies may be, it's not reality, not now and not tomorrow. Why not enjoy that for the hardcore market, there are good products that keep getting better?