But if you're talking specifically about cryptocurrencies and bitcoin then I assume you're a bit salty because you think you missed the hype. Don't worry tho, we are still early adopters.
If you are a small producer and you send a shipment of your widgets to Wal Mart, and Wal Mart then say "what widgets?", the efficiency of their SQL Server installation isn't a benefit that will bring you much comfort.
If you are a small producer and you send a shipment of your widgets to Wal Mart with little rfid stickers on tracked by a blockchain system that you, the shipping company, border security, Wal Mart's warehouse and Wal Mart's stores run nodes for, you have a system that may bring you a bit more comfort. Running a node is simpler (or at least more efficient - pen and paper is simpler than SQL Server...), and the outcomes more encouraging for all participants, than some of the alternatives.
The question "Why not just banks using computers?" is where distributed timestamp servers came in and there is an extensive literature devoted to both the ideological and practical arguments around this. Briefly because banks are untrustworthy, expensive and slow. Banks themselves using blockchains is recuperation ideologically speaking, and FOMO technologically speaking. It is less silly to the degree that it does improve banking transparency and trustworthiness, but abandoning proof-of-of-work for the nonsense of "permissioned" blockchains restores it to being very silly.
> little rfid stickers on them ...
If the problem you're trying to solve is the one you say, you might as well just run a few servers across different organizations / companies which replicate between themselves, like certificate transparency does, or like the gpg web of trust does... which isn't a blockchain because it's vastly more efficient.
We could have one big CT-style log system host many applications, but as the number of participants grew, we would want some mechanism to prevent spam. Even if there was no outright spam, some users would generate a large volume of logs with questionable utility, and humans would need to get together to decide if those users should be blacklisted or what.
Ethereum gives us spam control via gas costs. I can't imagine a good, low-maintenance solution that doesn't resemble some cryptocurrency. Paying fees from a ledger isn't absolutely necessary -- we could proof of work to discourage spam, like iota -- but charging fees in a ledger seems like the better solution, and isn't that much more complicated.