I mean they made a Movie spinoff from the show, so it was sufficiently popular at the time. It didn't have mass appeal staying power a la Eva or Geass, but the former is an outlier and the latter was made in an era where the production companies became much more sophisticated about fan cultivation and pre planned media mixing.
Oh yeah, I don't mean to suggest it wasn't popular, but it also doesn't seem to have had the same level of sustained popularity that it has here in the West.
