Does this make ETH useful in the real world or is it still a tehcno-ponzi scheme?
But on paper building something useful now is a bit easier as transaction cost is likely to come down and the network should support a more reasonable transaction volume.
When your global transaction volume per hour is capped below what even a small web server running on a tiny computer would easily handle, there isn't much you can do with it in the real world. And when those transactions then cost you tens/hundreds of dollars and take minutes/hours to clear, any utility that might exist goes out of the window. It's a complete non starter for anyone looking to do some transactions that actually have business value. Why would you? It's many orders of magnitude worse than what a plain old database gives you on all relevant dimensions.
That was the status quo up until the merge. Now that that is in the past, we'll see. I personally doubt Ethereum will be the tool of choice for this kind of thing. If you are serious about building something that does something useful, there are better tools available.