Taproot will in practice have an even smaller impact, as it only affects special transactions that normal people won't use.
So yeah, it's not zero progress, but it's certainly not much.
Now, in November taproot/schnor activates which gives us ptlc’s on the lightning network as well as makes a lightning channel opening transaction look like a normal single signature transaction, yay privacy. All of this lays the groundwork for the next major base layer change, in probably ~2023, anyprevout. This will give us “eltoo” on lightning which is nirvana. Eltoo removes the penalty mechanism which makes running a lightning node on a mobile phone or home node much more reasonable.
Protocols take a long time to develop, especially ones where a miss-step could mean the loss of billions of dollars.
Do not believe anyone telling you that their coin solved bitcoin’s scaling problems years ago.
PoW/PoS was replaced by FBA (Federated Byzantine Agreement) Its not a coin its technology used by several systems and based on BFT (which is way older than bitcoin and bitcoin actually is based on BFT as well although maybe unintentional).
FBA just adds the federated part so a decentral system can be build. While bitcoin instead used a work-reward lottery system (PoW) to decide who can write the next block rather than finding a block everyone agrees on. Its really not that hard to figure out which of these solutions probably works better and scales somewhat like a distributes system is expected to scale.