Thankfully there's cool stuff in the ecosystem that isn't a scam, but it's not newsworthy, so it doesn't go viral.
But given how online people are in general (and they're only likely to become more online in the future), it's natural they'll want digitally-native ways to organize themselves, represent ownership, qualify membership, etc.
The shift in concept required here is from viewing a token as "an investment" to viewing it as a form of legible social proof within its community context, which becomes more meaningful as communities grow beyond the "tipping point" where interpersonal proof (think webs-of-trust) is sufficient for coordination. NFTs (yes, they're still around!) are already serving this function for certain experimental communities (and even in less experimental ones, see POAPs).
In general, everything above is still in the experimental, live or die phase. We don't quite know where it's going. But it's pretty damn cool to watch if you're deeply invested in the internet as a medium (and as someone who "grew up online", I absolutely am).
* If it's a governance token system where more money == more power...well, I just don't think it's a good idea in general.
* If it's a system that tries to replicate the idea of one person/one vote, you have to have KYC (and re-KYC upon membership transfer) or it devolves into the first case. Then the entity doing KYC has centralized control over membership, so it seems like storing membership info on a ledger doesn't offer any benefits compared to just having a central membership database.
Regarding the former case, of money and power... this one is a little harder. In theory, if you're a part of some community, and a very rich person wanted to fuck up or infiltrate your community by leveraging their wealth, they could probably figure out a way to do it, crypto or not. At least in this case, the existing community members stand to reap some sort of benefit from it, in the sense that a new whale's buy-in will increase the value of their existing holdings. Then they can all cash out and start a new thing someplace else. It has a similar form and moral valence as neighborhood gentrification (but without the racialized element).
I tend to think most communities will solve this by having some external aim of coordination that discourages people from just speculating (which makes sense given that social proof exists relative to the community in question), even if the balance of power is determined based on buy-in. But again, I don't really know how it will play out in practice, if more regular people will actually take up these tools for non-speculation reasons, etc.
When I say coordination, I mean all sorts of collective decision-making and agency can take place using crypto as a medium, if someone has a vision and enough people are invested in making it happen, see: https://otherinter.net/research/squad-wealth/. Basically, if you need to get groups of people to align themselves and act in concert, and it's happening over the internet, crypto has the potential to make that happen. The technology is fundamentally social in nature, whereas an iPhone is fundamentally a personal object that happens to include some social tooling.
I don't know how it's going to look. Maybe groups will work together to purchase and maintain land. Maybe you'll see digital guilds or unions forming around creative niches. Regen (https://www.regen.network/) is working on communities for landowners who want to get carbon credits. It's really early. Maybe nothing will happen at all, and I'll look back on these posts with embarrassment. But it's exciting to work on projects building stuff that really doesn't exist yet, if only to see what happens.
(oh, and, people really aren't talking about this side of crypto at all. this is an entirely separate thing from bitcoin and defi)