Mimblewimble[0] is one interesting solution to this. Unfortunately, the requirement in current implementations (such as Grin) that both wallets be online to complete a transaction, eliminates some valuable types of transaction, such as sending coin to a cold wallet.
I do think for a 'world computer' like Ethereum, being able to ignore a substantial amount of old state is going to be critical for long-term use.
I also think that "blatant lie" is unnecessarily harsh. A blockchain is aspirationally forever, and it is a massively replicated data structure: it's certainly durable, and I would expect it to last a long time relative to, say, a random torrent.
This is my major concern with the direction Ethereum is going, which I could caricature as "scale up massively and keep everything forever": it becomes so expensive to keep copies of all data, that only large institutional players will bother, and not many of them. This makes blockchain integrity a "take my word for it" kind of thing, and the whole system is only as durable as the increasingly-enormous data centers which hold all that information.