I don’t know if that’s a reference to crypto for the majority of people - I’ve worked in crypto for years and I had an 0x name for my white hat hacking related accounts (it was trendy there a while back) but never for cryptocurrency stuff
every interaction in the wildly popular EVM space has 0x prefixed to it, for all EOAs, for all transaction IDs, for all smart contracts, and for several large projects and several thought leaders in the space
the consensus model does not require the 0x prefix to resolve a transaction destination but pretty much nobody knows that (some regional wallets omit the 0x), and it is almost purely cosmetic
This was originally brought up in the context of saying that certain people removed eth and added 0x which is in context still clearly a reference to crypto, so the username fad just changed, and these probably (sadly) shouldn't be seen as Ethereum/crypto dying or losing popularity. Your implication is that Ethereum and crypto are dying and their users are en masse getting very interested in computer science and the hexadecimal numbering system and all happened to decide to change their names to include 0x for that reason, but it seems a lot more likely that the crypto cult is just playing follow the leader.
No it's not. Where did I say that?