You are simply contradicting yourself because you are expecting all the coins should be having a real life application similar to bitcoin. Yes, ethereum is not a money but it is just a gas which is needed for its smart contracts to function. When ethereum is not for money like usage then why you are expecting them to be adopted by stores. You need to understand all the commodities cannot be money but money can act as commodity too.

Most altcoins are just creating their own use cases like gambling money or exchange fee (like BNB in previous version). Ethereum kind of smart contract based coins are having in-house use cases. But, you need to understand that success of a coin does not depend on use case as investors need good returns hence you simply need frequent pumps and dumps to adopters busy which will lead to huge success of that coin like how XRP is doing.