Maybe if you turned your mind off 12 years ago. Fast Zero knowledge proofs only left the research labs a handful of years ago and are now being used to power layer 2s that deliver 10 - 1000x scalability improvements. DeFi is barely 2 years old.

The consensus and scaling mechanisms being rolled out were only just created in the last few years (that's why Ethereum PoS took so long, thery were still making changes to the design as new research came out).