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It would be interesting to see actual numbers on how sales compared.
I suspect porthole sales were quite good. There's still quite a lot of survivor Zenith porthole sets out there relative to other sets despite Zenith having issues with high flyback failure in the porthole era (they fixed it around the time they went to rectangular CRTs).
The general public didn't understand aspect ratio or how a TV makes a picture so unless they saw a rectangular and a porthole side by side they might not realize the bigger picture is cropped. Also all sets had significant overscan back then so a rectangular masked CRT with an excessive amount of overscan might look to be cropped the same as a porthole. Zenith also had a Zoom switch that changed raster size from full porthole down to underscan similar to the double D masks on other brands so in the late 40s, when everyone was using the double D mask, a savy customer would say the cropping is no worse in underscan mode plus you can switch to fill the screen for a bigger picture.
Back in the late 40s there wasn't really a standardized way of measuring/marketing screen size and there were limits to how big glass technology would allow you to make a CRT so makers started taking the round CRTs and masking them non-rectangular in various ways to claim they had a bigger screen for the price than everyone else who were also using the same CRT.
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