Bitcoin became popular because it had a team of people who actively promoted it. Another opinion says that Silk Road helped Bitcoin become famous. And then most of these people were expelled from the team and bitcoin became not a means of payment for cypherpunks, but a world currency.
The big question is if we would still need such a team of people to be able to get more adoption. I remember that when I came here first to the forum in 2012 you could get coins for free at any corner. This made people download wallets, sign up at exchanges und trade coins. Because of that the whole ecosystem started to grow. This is somehow missing in my opinion. And don't get me wrong the coins you would recive then would be maybe worth 1-5 USD but still it was better to download a wallet etc. than to not recive that small amount.
A community seems like a more suitable term for me instead of a team. But besides Silk Road, there is also Wikileaks which adopt bitcoin too.
Anyway, within Bitcoin, there are still projects which give a minuscule amount of bitcoin. A project like
Carrot Course is one example of a project that encourages adoption by incentivizing people to learn about bitcoin. Currently, there is also some exchange that gives coins for free in order to complete KYC, but that is the problem. Some people are discouraged by the requirement of the verification.