My acquaintance with Ethereum began in 2017, then it was a very good technology. Probably everyone remembers, ICO, Bounty, crazy profits! I have been through this and am very grateful to ETH, but now everything is different.
If you did not use DEX, did not trade in the DeFi sector, then I envy you very much, because it was simply impossible to do this on the Ethereum blockchain LOL)
You know that the whole DeFi-thing could only happen and arise because of the possibilities that the Ethereum ecosystem offers? Without Ethereum the only thing we could do on the blockchain would probably still be to send x-amount of a currency to another wallet and sign a message and that would probably be it. Yes of course it is also true that the transaction fees on the Ethereum network were so ridiculously high during the height of the Defi-hype, with several hundred $ worths of fees for a dex-swap, that during that period it was not really usuable for a "normal" user because the transaction fees were often higher than the actual transfered or swapped volume. The ETH devs know about that problem though and it already has gotten much better and it hopefully will continue to move into that direction. So i am pretty sure that ETH will continue to be the number 2 crypto-project behind BTC.