OOP was hyped as the silver bullet that would solve the Software Crisis. Funnily enough, it didn't: programming is still hard, only the pain points have shifted. OO has its place, but when the idea is to allow programmers to think of their software entities the way they think about — well, objects, — then piling on the layers of abstraction for the sake of turning everything — adjectives, verbs, and conjunctions — into nouns seems counterproductive.
Then, too, the only serious alternative to OOP at that time was the imperative procedural style, which was producing monolithic slabs of code that lacked user-serviceable parts (all you could do was dance around them chucking bones in the air); compiler technology wasn't sophisticated enough and the machines they had to run on weren't powerful enough to do an adequate job of creating optimised machine code for other paradigms (functional, declarative, constraint-based) which only saw theoretical interest.