Back in the day, solar thermal was very popular. Pump water to the top of a building, and you can heat it and have the water pressure you need. Solar thermal is also 2.5x more efficient than PV, when used efficiently. As PV prices dropped, arguments about PV actually working better for water heating during cloudy weather came into play. There's also the project size - no contractor wants to do a $8k solar thermal project doing 35% of the electric bill for a small subset of homeowners, when they can do 3x the size, targeting 100% of the bill of all homeowners.
This means solar thermal is still very, very good... if you have the need for alot of hot water. So commercial, as well as swimming pool owners (at least, swimming pool owners who read DIYsolarforum).
But pragmatically, an electric hot water tank is the cheapest battery on the market. Put that bad boy on some smart load control (via the inverter, a load controller like Savant, or if you run Home Assistant, an Aeotec Zwave 40A controller) and you're way more cost effective than actually implementing solar thermal. So pour one out for solar thermal.
That said - if you like solar thermal, consider following Malta Solar. They're doing molten salt thermal to electric storage... like what was used with solar concentrators... but without the solar concentrator. So pour one out for solar concentrators too. PV has crushed all other forms of solar energy (aside from perhaps wind, and also, long duration solar storage i.e. fossil fuel). PV will continue to crush it until it's the primary fuel source of humanity unless we actually get behind nuclear or make significant inroads into fusion. Back to the topic - solar thermal will always be cost-effective for sites that have tremendous hot water needs, and will always need experts to implement it well.