It's difficult to find something that requires a blockchain, because the unique distinguishing feature of blockchains is the lack of any trusted central authority.
If you have a trusted authority, then you can do anonymous currency, money transfers, smart contracts, or anything similar 1000x more efficiently with a single server, an API, and some backend logic. All the distributed effort goes into making these possible at all without any central authority who can ban or filter transactions.
And for most real-world projects, having a government agency or tech company working as the trusted authority works just fine. It's only shady to illegal businesses where the lack of one is required.