Yes, there was a period of time, mostly after the ICO crash, where the market was relatively quiet and most people in the space worked on interesting technological problems. I don't want to get into arguments about the usefulness of blockchains and web3, but the intention of developers was not to scam consumers, at least not explicitly or from the outset. Now the intention of most projects is explicitly to rug pull and scam people, mostly due to the NFT craze.