Responding to your edited-to-add: This is pretty much where I'm coming from now (except I did buy into Ethereum and a few PoS chains to see what the fuss is about, finding nothing of any interest to do there besides just hold onto the tokens, like glorified angel investments).

But responding to your "but I truly believe there something in the works, being obscured by an unfortunate amount of noise": One passage of the article that really struck me was this one:

> When an engineer looks into a problem, they will at first gather the requirements. What does the system they need to build need to do and how and for whom etc. Afterwards they will look at existing technologies and see which technology and platform fits best to the requirements.

Notice how that implies the availability of "existing technologies" such that the engineer can choose whichever "technology and platform fits best to the requirements". There is a circularity to this argument! How do any of those existing technologies come to exist if all engineers are merely choosing existing technologies upon which to build the thing that meets their requirements?

I'm still incredibly unsure about this, but I think the scriptable blockchains (ie. the ones that aren't Bitcoin) could well be the "existing technology" for some set of requirements (either in the future or in the present but in a way that is unclear) that I lack the vision to see.