I guess two things need to happen so we can get out of this rut in the technology cycle.
One, the Web3 developers and contributors need to shed their engineering mindset and start getting preoccupied with UX and ease of adoption. As you mentioned, we’re not going to convert the market to embrace the tech for tech’s sake; the onus is on us to adapt to the market’s expectations that “it just works”. That’s the Apple model and there’s a ton of money to be made for those who crack that magic formula.
Second, but related to the first point, is that the tech needs to take a backseat and become an invisible layer. No mass market user needs to even know that their next-gen Venmo or SSO is settled on, or powered by, the Ethereum network. We as a community want our champion L1 network to get the name recognition we think it deserves, but the reality is that just like no average user cares about TCP/IP or even knows about it, our own tech needs to efface itself and be a silent enabler of higher-level apps and use cases.