Indigenous Southeast Asian World Religion

Southeast Asia has always been a crossroads of trade between different civilizations -Initially India and China, but later the Islamic and Western worlds as well. Initially, the indigenous cultures practiced localized forms of animism, until Indian merchants and missionaries brought Hinduism and Buddhism to the emerging aristocracies that developed as the local societies became more stratified and outward-looking. Theravada Buddhism became dominant in mainland Southeast Asia, while the Malay peoples of the East Indies embraced Islam. Indigenous animist beliefs remained only in small, isolated tribal peoples in the interior lands, and in Vietnam where Chinese influences shaped it in line with Confucian, Taoist, and Chinese shen worship.

What if, rather than embracing Hinduism and later Buddhism and Islam, the early rulers of one of the fledgling Southeast Asian kingdoms (Funan, Champa, Java Dwipa, etc) remained animist and refined their animism into a more structured religion in the same way that Shinto developed in Japan? Could this religion remain the dominant religion throughout the region to the modern day, competing with Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity as a major world religion?
 
Just to clarify, what do you mean by "compete"?

I'm not trying to sound pedantic, but there is a big difference for instance between something like Shinto which more "survives" by latching onto other religious traditions and being practically more secular at this point and something like Hinduism which has maintained a distinct and sometimes exclusive identity in the face of other exclusivist religions.

The reason I ask is that the function and extent of the POD sort of relies on this. A more codified animism isn't hard, but one that actively "battles" other faiths rather than becoming a comparative side show like Shinto are two very different things.
 
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