Unfortunately all the NFT scams (most of which were run on top of ethereum) and smaller coins/networks created and promoted solely for pump-and-dump schemes (not ethereum) got conflated in some people's heads with everything else in the cryptocurrency space and now they think it is all just a scam that doesn't do anything besides trick people into losing money.
If you want a majority of people using your thing, perception is important.
- Governments were pretty late to the party with regulations/law enforcement because they understandably didn't know if it was serious. This meant your average person who lost in a scam probably had no justice.
- The volume of scams made it seem that all of this was normal - best case was you did some research that found out before you put money in. This is partly because of governments but also there's no central authority from the crypto side to say what is safe and what isn't. "Buyer beware" with an every day currency/payment system doesn't really do you any favors in terms of adoption.
- People lost substantial real money to complicated technical issues on top of the scams
- All of this meant you had to do your research to fundamentally use the thing safely, which turned it more into an investing chore than payment convenience.
So it's actually pretty reasonable if someone has this impression
