Ironically, we've now looped back, and do pretty t-buffer-esque usage with modern DX11/DX12 pipelines.
One of the simplest functions of the T-buffer was to do temporal AA using a fixed function supersampler but also do integration over several frames, which didn't come into being in a modern AAA title until Doom 2016.
For a technology invented in 1999, 3DFx was too ahead of their time.
For a modern example, imagine if the RTX debacle of current gen Geforces destroyed the entire company. Nvidia backed down and released the 16xx series cards, 3DFx went bankrupt instead while everyone else was releasing the 16xx equivalent of that time period (early Nvidia and ATI cards).