I was more positive about crypto before the big NFT grift came along.

But even then, hardly anybody seemed to care about making crypto work as a currency. It was all about the speculation/gambling, get-rich-quick schemes, and memecoin pump+dumps. Nobody bought their groceries or paid their rent with crypto, it was just the currency of darknet drugs and cybercrime. And multi-million-dollar exchange hacks seemed to be almost weekly headlines.

Crypto wasn't going well, even before NFTs came along, and before the environmental opposition to mining ramped up.