The well-known sinologist John DeFrancis (also well-known for his critique of the Chinese writing system) has written pretty extensively on this. Here is a shorter piece. The even shorter summary of that, is that Mao did have a vision of replacing Chinese characters, and there was a government project to that extent, considering both proposals for Cyrillic and Latin-based versions, the latter resulting in Pinyin. The previous nationalist government had also considered the idea though. As far as I can tell these ideas and plans never went so far as a serious attempt to replace Chinese characters, even if that was considered an ultimate goal.

The explanation given is that conservatism won out in the end. Which I suppose isn't so surprising - look at Korean; Hangul was around for over 500 years before becoming the main form of writing for Korean in the late 19th - early 20th century, despite being very easy to learn and better adapted to the Korean language. Indeed, it was looked down upon as an 'inferior' way of writing, for women and uneducated people.

It's not unlike how our own academics were expected to write in Latin in the same time-frame. (and the same kind of attitudes show up today when/whereever spelling reforms are discussed - there seems to be a universal inclination to believe that users should serve the writing and not vice versa)

Similar tradition and attitudes have also kept Kanji (Chinese characters) in Japanese up to present day as well, even though it would be perfectly possible for them to write with the simpler kana syllabaries only. (not quite as simple as Hangul though)

The Vietnamese switched away from Chinese characters writing like Koreans did, and around the same time, with their romanicized Quốc ngữ script becoming dominant around the 1930's.

A followup question of sorts: in the 1950s Soviet linguists were hired to construct a useful latinization for Chinese (Pinyin) and there was some talk of having it replace traditional Chinese script. After all, this was a new era for China, where a completely new society was to be created and adopting a new writing system would go along nicely with that. Also, during this time only about 11% of the Chinese population was fully literate anyway, so replacing the writing system with something more sensible was really quite doable.

Is there any validity to this description of events (which I'm getting from some casual reading on the history of China)?

And also: if this is true, could it be said that one of the forces of conservatism working against this scheme was in fact Mao himself, who as it happened was an enthousiastic calligrapher himself (the style associated with him is still widely practiced in China today) and would therefore be reluctant to oversee the abolishment of an artform he himself enjoyed?