But it seems like the primary use cases are speculation, criminal and terrorist funding schemes, tax evasion, and money laundering.
If I buy Apple stock, technically that's tied to a corporation named Apple that has assets and revenue (more or less, maybe less these days than you might assume). But bitcoins are just numbers, some more valuable than others.
But more to the point, hoarders were encouraging the use of bitcoin as a store of value, lying about their true use cases (speculation), hoping the big fish would start investing so the early people would cash out. It turned out to be one massive pump and dump scheme, but with cryptography, so that makes it okay.
You can only vote with your feet so many times, and if the choice is always to flee instead of demanding accountable government, eventually there will be no place to go. By providing a workaround for government non-accountability, Bitcoin encourages people to avoid the issue instead of engaging with it.
You could say that about every defense-in-depth based approach to a problem. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're a net negative.
It's not perfect, but you have higher odds of moving 10k+ in Bitcoin out of an oppressive system than you do any other asset.