in 2016 I watched this conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yth7O6yeZRE

it had all the projects trying to do anything "decentralized" on the internet, old and new. some of these are still alive today. there was almost no shitcoin talk. the speakers were no bitcoin enthusiasts at all, they were mostly young software enthusiast-types that only seemed to care about their small projects that aimed to route data from A to B in various ways and purposes.

at some point there was a panel with multiple of the speakers, and they were asked: "why do you think now we will succeed in making a decentralized internet, and not 10 or 15 years ago when many projects were also trying this and failed?"

the somewhat-unanimous answer was: "because now we have bitcoin, and the ability to transfer money in a decentralized manner was the missing element in the previous attempts"

if we had this same event today 100% of the participants would be saying bitcoin is horrible. why?