Not really. What Nirvana did was kill 80s hair metal., bands like Poison, Motley Crue, etc. Not the harder core "pure" metal like Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, Pantera, etc.
Metal has always been somewhat of a niche. I remember a brief period in the early 90s, where Metallica was popular enough to get into the mianstream consciousness and heard one of their songs on the radio, but beyond that it was never really popular.