Ethereum (and blockchain tech in general) genuinely open new doors to development and make it possible to do things that were not possible before. Especially now that we're several years further along, the tooling is a lot better and the design space is significantly more thoroughly explored.

Yes, there's a lot of shady activity, a lot of scams, a lot of broken technology, and a lot of people with visions they can't deliver upon, but the same was true in the early days of the Internet and blockchain is starting to move past the 'dotcom bubble' phase and onto 'this tech is actually useful' phase.

It's not there yet, most of the tech is still nascent, but it's a lot less nascent than it was in 2017, and there are more people working on it than ever.