If anything, large financial institutions have by now realized that they're not interested in public blockchains[0], one notable example as of late being the Australian Securities Exchange[1].
These technical improvements are a bit as if a salesman reduced the price of a product, on top of free delivery. That's nice, sure, but that doesn't mean you need the product any more than before. There are more fundamental reasons why smart contracts are not widely used, and they're not addressed by these technical improvements.
[0]: as defined in https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g... [1]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/australian-securities-exc...
That's what I'm doubting. Ecological concerns etc. are a problem, but in my experience public blockchain solutions fail earlier, at the stage where one asks "would there be any benefit" before asking what the costs might be.
Another example of something that has changed for ethereum is Proof Of Stake. Some years ago, I worked for a large financial organisation, and we had a use case that would have saved a lot of internal work to move onto a public blockchain. Given the organisations eco aspirations, using a POW based system was never going to be acceptable. Now that ethereum is on Proof Of Stake, it's actually conceivable that these kinds of applications could be deployed by large financial institutions.