People were not blindly buying ethereum. THey were buying ethereum caused by they wanna try to be the validator in the POS network. It's not the same as 2017 when ico bubble became a very big trend and people were massively buying ethereum to invest in the ico.
Ethereum will not get the same bullish trend like when it was touching the ATH.
Yes,,, I would say this is a bit different from 2017 where people were actually needing ETH not just for cryptokitties but also to actually invest in ICOs who only accepted ETH. That was what caused the spike in demand. Not the same today as people are needing ETH for gas alone.
ETH 2.0 testnet crash on the weekend shows just how weak it still is.