This is actually misleading statement. Most of companies that are said to be accepting bitcoin / crypto don't even see that crypto. They accept payments via third party service that converts it to money before it gets to that company. Only thing that makes it more handy to crypto people is that they don't have to convert it to money themselves. But in many cases they do need to reveal their ID while purchasing something and it gets linked to the wallet / transaction they made.
And difference to internet is that back when internet was just in the beginning, it benefited students and scholars as they were able to be connected instantly. That was revolutionary. Coders were very interested about everything related to that. These days every coder that i occasionally ask about blockchain, smart contracts and web3.0 are mainly laughing at the idea. They see the meme worth of it, but not any practical applications that couldn't be done with local databases faster and cheaper.
Who knows where this is going, but i still see some crypto believers talking about "it's not about the cryptocurrency, it's about the blockchain and the tech" or even more hilarious "lose the cryptocurrency and leave the tech". And seeing those people praising the tech without understanding the point of incentives makes me believe that adoption (what ever that means) isn't even close. Because buyers/speculators don't understand anything about the tech. It's all just meme money. And that's ok to me.
I think this is the beginning of the crypto era: businesses will still accept USD, but they have allowed customers to use their crypto instead of having to sell crypto, which means crypto has been legalized. This is a big step forward because in many countries, using crypto for payments is illegal.
The application of blockchain technology has been tested with IBM's hyper-blockchains and received positive feedback from businesses. I think more testing will be needed to understand the real-world value of this technology. For me, right now it is still just a medium for easy cross-border transfer of USDT.
Blockchain is the platform, crypto is the energy that drives the platform. Without crypto, values cannot be transferred and blockchain cannot be maintained. Satoshi used this mechanism for Bitcoin from the early days, but many people still refuse to understand this simple thing.