Because Smalltalk big supporters like IBM, decided to repurpose their Smalltalk offerings into Java.
Visual Age Smalltalk had a role similar to .NET on the OS/2 ecosystem, SOM (OS/2 version of COM) supported Smalltalk, implementation inheritance and meta-classes, so yeah it didn't help to go full on Java.
Also another Visual Age thing, Visual Age for C++ v4 also had a Smalltalk like experience for C++, unfortunely it was too demanding in resources.
Visual Age Smalltalk had a role similar to .NET on the OS/2 ecosystem, SOM (OS/2 version of COM) supported Smalltalk, implementation inheritance and meta-classes, so yeah it didn't help to go full on Java.
Also another Visual Age thing, Visual Age for C++ v4 also had a Smalltalk like experience for C++, unfortunely it was too demanding in resources.