This site shows the top DeFi protocols and their locked value in their smart contracts. It's hardly exhaustive but just visiting and researching the top 10 or 15 will be instructive for you.
Axie Infinity the game has hundreds of thousands of users and growing like crazy. Tens of millions at least own some cryptocurrency. Ethereum has more than 1 million active wallet addresses and it's growing on an exponential curve.
https://www.benzinga.com/markets/cryptocurrency/21/07/218240...
You probably haven't seen it because you are following HN and mainstream news and expect to be informed on it through their filter.
The main success stories I would point out are Uniswap, Sushi, Aave, Compound, Maker, Synthetix, Liquity, OpenSea, Rarible, Sandbox, Decentraland, Aavegotchi, Audius, Matcha, Zapper, and more than I can list to be honest. It's a bit like trying to explain all the interesting use cases of the internet to an early dot com skeptic.
Which dApps? How many users are there? And why can't that dApp be built on traditional stacks?
> building real value
Haven't seen any of this yet. I've seen speculation on coins, and then there are many layers of financial products built on top.
The application space is essentially non-existent as a use-case.