To be fair -- it's 10 years since Bitcoin. People didn't start innovating (widely) on blockchains until Ethereum came along and paved the way for generalized blockchains.
> It's precisely because it's been 10 years and the reality hasn't nearly matched the early hype that people have cooled on the technology, and now want solid results instead of more empty talk. It's long past the point where telling everyone big things are coming is enough, it's time to show those big things.
Excessive hype is normal and expected for any disruptive technology. AI took decades to become fruitful, the Internet took a few decades to become mainstream. We're seeing hype with cloud computing, VR, IoT, synthetic foods, and all of these have very vocal nay-sayers.
IMO, blockchains are revolutionary but also very primitive -- there's a ton of innovation in this space, and its spawned a variety of new areas for very interesting research (in trustless consensus, decentralized economies, stable currencies, algorithmic governance, and cryptographic applications.)
Of course, all of this is my opinion, and only time will tell.
(/me spent a decade working on distributed consensus infrasatructure at Google.)