Unfortunately for me I was not all over Japan arcades in the late 90s. Most of what I recall from the late 90s around here were Naomi stuff & sit down racers.
There were certainly other arcade machines, but in late 1998 through 1999, Asura Zanmaden was in a lot of arcades, and it was stunning for that era. But at the same time, those hyper games were directly competing with Namco games where the developers had a lot of experience in 3D fighters. SNK was just learning. So obviously more people would be playing Tekken TTT or SC2. And on the 2D side, I would say that in the late 90s, the CPS3 was probably the king of attracting players, as Jojo machines always had people playing them.
20 years later, I would not say the Hyper was hype, but it was competing with a lot of more polished games.