There’s honestly nothing further you could do with stone cold at that point.
It did fail, but not because Austin didn’t kill it making it work because those first three months of his heel run were great, but the problem was they had no other baby faces stand up to him.
Rock went to film movies and they turned Hunter heel again and aligned him with Austin. Which I’m conflicted about because I love the two man power trip. They were amazing killing people, but without a top level baby face, they had nowhere to go.