In cities with a CBD, they are reasonably popular, and Limes (which has set up a presence in my city of Brisbane Australia) asserts that they have GPS locators in them so that they get picked up and recharged overnight, so no piling up of unwanted scooters like old shopping trolleys.
But an hour south is a huge beach resort city (the Gold Coast) that is very decentralised, making the scooters much less useful. There, the local council has claimed it will pick up every scooter it sees and take it out of service.
The business model is not like Uber, where a disruptive business can’t easily be fought. If a council gives itself the power to clean up the streets without purporting to permanently confiscate the scooters, I suspect that that will do sufficient damage to the business model that will mean they cannot thrive where they are not wanted.