As the joke goes:

Next the psychiatrist treated the optimist. Trying to dampen his out look, the psychiatrist took him to a room piled to the ceiling with horse manure. But instead of wrinkling his nose in disgust, the optimist emitted just the yelp of delight the psychiatrist had been hoping to hear from his brother, the pessimist. Then he clambered to the top of the pile, dropped to his knees, and began gleefully digging out scoop after scoop with his bare hands. 'What do you think you're doing?' the psychiatrist asked, just as baffled by the optimist as he had been by the pessimist. 'With all this manure,' the little boy replied, beaming, 'there must be a pony in here somewhere!

It's become a self-perpetuating memeplex. How could all of those thought leaders be completely wrong?

The working components of the Blockchain ecosystem continue to function just fine. The speculative stuff (which is paying for the sectors dev costs) is struggling at the moment. It'll work itself out.

Because it works? Bitcoin is truckin' along. You don't have to use it if you don't want to.

Bitcoin & monero are working great, what’s your issue with them?

It has been proven to work well in Cryptocurrency it can work in other applications.