How useful is French worldwide?

I grew up fluent and it was a suuuuper useful language to know around Europe (far, far more than Spanish and usually English outside Spain and England), but now in the US I only hear it spoken around me about once a week, while I hear Spanish almost daily. Is this Spanish because of immigration, or had it always been peculiar in the United States? (Sorry I don’t have a different word). I know that French speaker levels are growing a lot in Africa and South Asia even though I have never gone there.