There is a reason nobody goes around trading tiny bits of gold for goods and services. It is useful to have an abstraction that makes transactions easier and helps mitigate risk.
Credit cards, paypal and all the rest existed before bitcoin. I mean it's nifty that I can do it without a single intermediary authority, but it's not that special.
I think the lack of revocation available to bitcoin is a (and I had myself for saying this) 'a feature'. If somebody sends me payment in bitcoin, I definitely know it can't be charged-back for example. It's like sending cash in the mail. Now that comes with the flip side, that they are putting all their trust in me.
The way I see it, people with money want to drive crypto adoption because it will tip the balance of power further in their favor. A fully unregulated currency and transaction system can be much more easily controlled by the people with the most capital without having to let that pesky democratic process getting in the way by letting the poors have a say.
Maybe some people were hyping it as a PayPal replacement back in the pre-2017 days, but that narrative has largely failed to gain followers and is now very out of favor.
The digital gold narrative and layer one of the new global, open, permisionless, and fair financial system narrative have been big and growing ever since I got involved in 2015ish.
In fact, it was only the emergence of the lightning network that proved the layered system approach that has made me consistently bullish for these past 7 years. If we had to scale payments on the base blockchain's 7tps limit, it would absolutely be an absurd, silly speculative bubble doomed to collapse.
Luckily, the layered approach is proving itself and winning.
This used to be the case years and years ago but it's been understood that without some additional layers this will never be the case. It is being billed as a value-store like gold by large institutions on and off of Wall Street though, so that's far more likely (and to be fair has proven to be fairly stable for a few years now).