Can someone eli5 why emule stopped being used, if people liked it so much?

Maybe not an eli5, but lots of reasons.

There's no stable, consistently updating client that everyone agrees on, the real 'emule' client hasn't been updated in over a decade. Once you get past that hurdle, the setup is also a lot more cumbersome than other file sharing options. The network also has kind of a bad reputation because there's not a great way to see if you can trust a file until you're finished downloading it and people definitely do take advantage of that.