Frankly, I'm not interested in "critical mass" whatever that means. I want the benefits of free (as in speech not beer) digital products and services. I don't need a critical mass of the population to do that. Bitcoiners talk about critical mass adoption because they want to replace the existing system. I view crypto as in addition to it, not instead of it.

Well, if there isn't much adoption, there likely won't be many products and services for you to use. You may be fine with that, but it's not necessarily congruent with the enormous amount of hype this whole experiment has received in the last decade or so.