It started as an ICOs selling off utility tokens. ICOs have a broken incentive structure which leads them to over sell and hype the technology to increase the founders wealth. They are still overselling and hyping future tech that has not been proven. PoS is advertised as a free lunch PoW but PoS does not stand up to scrutiny and likely devolves to PoW with nothing as stake grinding. Vitalik has also put his name on and pumped countless ICOs which have left bagholders with nothings.

Ethereums tech is based off scaling bitcoin in an more ambitious way than bitcoin maintainers consider safe. Ethereum is still PoW and every client must download and validate all other clients smart contracts. This does not scale and leads to centralisation. Removing the most important property of these networks designed to be controlled by no one group/person. Smart contracts and decentralised exchanges are the goals of a decentralised network but Ethereum has sold the idea before they have the technology to achieve this.

Ethereum has excelled at regulator arbitrate. It looks like it's not controlled by one group so it's not regulated like a company. But one group controls the rules and the hard forks on the network. It is a success in this way