Hype is part of what drives technology and I don't see it going away any time soon - because a lot of people make a buck purely by milking hype cycles.
I've come to see there are two modes of intelligence. The ability to understand something and say 'yes' to it is complemented by bullshit detectors, a more mature ability to see through other people muddying the waters trying to look smart, and reject their nonsense.
Every cycle has its real innovators and hype-pedlars. At the height of blockhain madness a decade ago they had worked themselves into a frenzied fetish of near-supernatural woowooism. Once all the smoke and hullabaloo has cleared, and all the grandiose promises have fallen to the wayside, what remains is a core of genuinely useful and relatively simple core concepts that enter the canon, along with standards and protocols.
This line in TFA sums it up:
> I needed a database.
The same happened with "data". The hype problem there has always been a lack of telos reminiscent of the underpants gnome's flawed "profit?" scheme. Somewhere is a crucial missing step, where we ask "Why?". And the answer is "don't worry, the data plus magical "AI" fairy dust will reveal why". There is a quite religious (faith-like) flavour to this.
I blame the NSA. The idea that "collect it all" is anything but a thugish brute force excuse to waste of billions dollars building data-centres, has led to commercial obsession with "data" as a panacea.
It isn't "big data" per se that's a problem. Some applications, like in medicine or environmental science, absolutely thrive on large sets and sophisticated analytics. But the fact is that in most applications it's mostly useless, burdensome, energy-consuming, and space-wasting. But "data-hoarding" and over-analysis is pushed by those with sledgehammers to sell for cracking nuts.