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The way it has supported the development of practical zero-knowledge proof-based applications alone is worth the weight of the blockchain industry in full, and then some.

Not sure it has made it worth wading through the 2017 hot takes that HN continues to insist on upvoting though.

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While I get your point, zkSNARKS preceded blockchain by two decades.

No - zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARgument of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) was first outlined in 2012[1] and the first real production implementation of it in the wild was Zcash (development of which started in 2013).

The ZK proof protocols being used today in blockchains are very different than those envisioned in the 80s. Specifically they are "non interactive" and "succinct" (proof is very short and easy to verify). Most of the massive leaps in development of ZK proof technology recently has been led by crypto currency space.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2090236.2090263

Ironically the zksnark paper had a glaring, crypto system breaking error and the implementers of zcash went out of their way to hide the parameters until sapling, where they could correct the problem.

That being said, zcash is a quite useful construction.

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