The end result was an abomination, in which every company fought to have a little bit of their tech included in the final specification.
I can't imagine Gaia-X being any different. To be honest, most members are probably in it for the same reason we were - free money.
if this gaia-x thing dies (or not), organizations in europe will carry on using AWS, Azure etc without noticing or caring, no?
There are existing providers in Europe who have small clouds with less services and integrations, and sometimes not the same performance or reliability as well (such as Scaleway, OVH, Hetzner, ...) who could use those funds to improve their offering and provide a realistic alternative to foreign cloud providers.
This does not prevent companies from building sovereign cloud, but it cuts public funding where it's the most needed.
There is IPCEI CIS which aims at actually helping building a cloud provider rather than standards but I don't know much about it.
Nextcloud CEO Frank Karlitschek well summarized it:
“I don't think Gaia-X has a future. It's basically a paper monster that will exist but will not have any impact in the market, unfortunately."