It's reasonable to be skeptical given the history. But honestly, there has been a rush of activity in "the merge" this year, starting just a few months ago.
The proof of stake (PoS) network has been live with serious money since late last year, so it's becoming relatively established, and the merge is the technical steps to join the entire PoW Ethereum transaction history, processes and existing software into the PoS network, without a single disruptive event.
It's as much of an ecosystem process as a technical process, to retain its value across the merge. Technically it is rather complicated too. The PoS system diagram is more complex than the equivalent PoW system diagram. There are so many things to get right in a complex adversarial computation system like Ethereum, where economic motivations cause people to hunt for every conceivable hack and advantage, and the system's logic has to be regularly updated to deincentivise those.