It is not really a dead end for ethereum blockchain as you might imagine the way it is right now. It is having a bit of a hard time because they are postponing the 2.0 as much as they can while working on it so when something unexpected like DeFi craze happens while there is a pandemic and nobody is at the offices and they are literally working on something else at the time, it is always normal that it would be a big clogged, we have seen ETH be clogged before as well but everything went back to normal isn't it?

After that you could have 2x the transaction count and it would have handled it well enough. Ethereum blockchain constantly gets updates, it is one of the most active big timer out there and honestly I believe this will eventually end be cheaper again soon as well.