Earlier quoted context omitted.
DeFi is a core component of my ETH bull hypothesis. All this decentralized activity requires the purchase of ETH to pay for/transact on.
It requires some way to fund it, but that needn't necessarily be ETH. It also well could be, and they have first mover advantage. But, and it's a big but, I think the most important thing people who know much about crypto forget is: Other people are not like you. Most people have still never even heard of Etherium. Most people won't touch something like that without explicit approval from a government. Which, obvious…
This statement was true in 2016, 2018 and 2021. The difference being the momentum - a LOT more people have heard of Ethereum now than back then. I think you might be underestimating the network effect that Ethereum has in the space. All the tooling, beginner-friendly tutorials/books/blogs, institutions and funds flowing into the projects, the sheer number of people working on projects is super impressive.
For anything else to catch up with Ethereum, it's going to take a lot more than "being better technologically". Ethereum currently does have major scaling issues but the community is converging on the "rollups" Layer-2 solutions [1] as a temporary option until it gets added into Eth2. So I suspect the next few months will be a little rough but things like Matic.network or Optimism will start maturing.
[1] https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-r...