At no point in time, unless you're in one of a few very specific communities (that are on the margins themselves), has Bitcoin been accepted as a norm. It has always been worked against from the moment it came on the normies' radar. From insane licensing requirements in NY, through the IRS taxing the hell out of any value retained (and only gained against the ever inflating fiat crap they print) to the hopefully now-ending era where middlemen and ponzinomics thrive through cronyism, has there not been anything encouraging or even enabling Bitcoin as an MoE. The only time it wasn't frowned upon was when there was no adoption at all and it was on no one's radar.

This doesn't mean that there's defeat, to the contrary. If politicians/bankers/scammers are looking to marginalize for-purpose Bitcoin-as-MoE and only promote it as some virtual asset you can buy but never sell because of the insane taxation, broker fees, and so on, then that's fine for them, but we're used to operating in the margins. Because that's where we started, and we've not grown out of that anyway. If normies just want to accept the ETFs and the Saylor scams, then that is their loss.