That's how it was presented to me. AWT was platform dependent, so you'd get Windows/Mac/Linux-specific inputs like radio buttons when they were created. Swing changed Java's GUI development to be platform independent, making radio buttons appear the same across platforms. With the emergence of mobile devices, and therefore more rendering engines, JavaFX was introduced to to unify design across device (or become device independent).

That said, I suppose JavaFX never took off. I think it wasn't that people hated it, but that the people that would be the primary adopters had already built their applications in Swing or as Applets years/decades ago. JavaFX was an improvement, but convincing a company to change a mission critical GUI would be too costly to do. Coupled with how GUI education in CS is abysmal, everyone stuck with Swing because they didn't want to "learn a new thing they already hated".