I think that now it is just missing manpower, i.e. more developers, or businesses, people interested to invest time, energy and money into Monero based startups, I may be biased but as a dev myself I think of development opportunities all the time that could make it more usable or friendly as a payment method for goods and services, both online and offline, like a btcpayserver alternative focused on Monero, an AI platform where you buy credits with monero, social media like Nostr where donations are made in Monero (I always wanted a video platform like Odysee to achieve this since video creation is a great fit for monetization and subscriber benefits), patreon/locals/subscribestar alternatives paid in Monero, gaming platforms like itchio. But I already have my work so I can't code everything at once

In general I think we just need people using it either for fun, or for actual income, and then it is like a bandwagon effect where it would translate to real life where everyone is like "I can just use Monero" and we may see the market cap in a similar position of the "top popular coins", and where making it illegal is useless