I think that it is difficult to calculate how much Ethereum investors have invested in new projects over the past years, while most of these projects were not promising or fraudulent. But one way or another, all these ethereum were withdrawn from the cryptocurrency market, due to which the capitalization of ethereum fell, as did its popularity. I believe that the quality of projects that use erc 20 directly affect the popularity of Ethereum, although Ethereum has not yet fully demonstrated its full potential. I very much hope that Ethereum becomes a full-fledged coin with its blockchain and will be independent of Bitcoin. Maybe my words will seem dubious to someone, but I believe in the potential of ethereum much more than even Bitcoin. The main problem of Bitcoin is scalability and it is much more difficult to solve it than for ethereum.
I don't know about that, the bitcoin developers are working really hard to try to solve the issue of scalability and that is why they created the lightning network, the problem of ethereum is the same problem that all coins have, ethereum is trying to become independent from bitcoin movements when bitcoin has almost 70% dominance over this market, the only way for ethereum to become independent is for the dominance of bitcoin to go down and that is only possible if other people release good projects in this market something that is very rare.