Breaking and Popping are different. Popping comes from Funk music and started in California. Breaking comes from Hip Hop and started in New York. Although there's evidence of both, especially the latter, having origins in Africa too. Tariq Nasheed not gonna like hearing that.
Popping, locking, mannequin (robot), and liquid and digits (waving) go well together. Jooking and Turfing are in the same vein and kinda outgrowths of some of them.
Breaking is very athletic and potentially acrobatic. The average person can't do that shyt. That's why it fell out of the mainstream in the US by the 1990s. Even in the 1980s, it was East Coast Latinos doing it more.
Breaking never was big nationally in the US either. Most of the times when you hear people say they were Breaking as a kid, they were actually doing Popping and Waving or something else. That's especially the case when someone from California or the South references it. Whenever someone says they were a Breakdancer, they was never a "Breakdancer". That's a word invented by the media, just like the later "Hip Hop dance" genre. B-Boys don't use that shyt.
In the 2000s and early-2010s, I would say France and South Korea really kept B-Boying alive and pushed Breaking to its limits. Europe, East Asia and South America appreciated the art / sport more than North America.
It's kinda like how EDM genres never went national in the US but did in Western Europe, then Japan and then Eastern Europe, until Skrillex blew it up in the US and elsewhere.
