This comment by @grayruby got me thinking:

Almost everything relating to blockchain, tokenization, stablecoins is being built on private blockchains by companies with way more inertia, financial and political power so their "the world will move on chain" thesis might be somewhat right but their stupid coins aren't going to profit from it.

Why are people building "private blockchains"? The whole reason for the blockchain apparatus was that Satoshi was solving the trust issues in decentralized money. If you're gonna just run a private, centralized service, there isn't any need for it. Isn't a "private blockchain" an oxymoron?

Then, I came up with a theory. I'm sure it's not new, and someone has written about it somewhere else, but it's new to me and so I thought I'd share it.

And the theory is: investors all have a certain identity that they're tied up with. "I'm a dividend investor." "I'm a venture capitalist". And, of course, "I'm a crypto investor."

So part of the answer is, there's money sloshing around amidst a class of people who self identify as "crypto investors". Within the world of crypto investors, there are two types:

(A) Those who actually understand the technology and the reason for it
(B) Those that don't

The problem is, the investors in class (B) still have capital to deploy. So a grift forms around them in which people market buzzwords like "blockchain" and "defi" to them, and they invest their capital with them, nevermind that none of it really made sense in the first place.

It would also explain why Tradfi companies also market into these buzzwords. It's not because they actually believe in any of it, or have even thought too deeply about it. All they know is that there is capital waiting in the wings which is self-identified as crypto capital... and all they're doing is going after that pot of money with whatever nonsense sales pitch they can muster.

QED