The way things are shaping up, I think the story arc for this next cycle or two will be:

-A lot of altcoin VC money flows back into the Bitcoin ecosystem, builds a bunch of bubbles in startups based on too-early tech and broad speculation, and gets washed out when that tech takes longer than expected to mature. Additionally, a lot of the capital will get pulled toward speculation/trading of tokens on top of Bitcoin and blow up from that direction as well.

-Then after it washes out, there will indeed be some good mature utility-focused tech that emerges out of it that makes Bitcoin's layered stack better and more user-friendly. Bitcoin, both as sound money and to some extent as an immutable truth layer, emerges stronger.