If you think it's hard to scale Bitcoin, imagine how hard it would be to scale Ethereum where all computers doesn't just verify transactions (really simple scripts actually) and instead run fully Turing complete scripts.

To try to do this anyway Ethereum has been adding on extreme amounts of complexity. They have many, so for unsolved, hard issues in front. For example their move to proof-of-stake (which has several major weaknesses, see the nothing-at-stake problem for example) and how they need to shard the blockchain (to avoid all nodes validating everything).

In short Ethereum is struggling to not collapse from it's own weight.

> Is it just the hype and Bitcoin being first?

Well... It is indeed just hype that Bitcoin is first.