Crypto is a maturing industry, and most economic value is generated by financial applications - chiefly SoV. Non-financial apps, L2s etc. are great for consumers, but a vast majority of ETH's value will come from institutions/whales using financial apps on the L1 itself. See: BTC, still dominant with 0 scaling.

BTC dominant w/o scaling but doesn’t require using chain much

Tougher time seeing parallel for long-term app activity on Ethereum L1 remaining as dominant

Maybe possible if they’re increasingly really mostly offchain apps (eg uniswapx, coprocessor style, etc) blurring line of L1/L2 anyway

Vast majority of ETH's value is identical to BTC - alternative/speculative SoV hold without using chain much. ETH does feature additional demand vectors, but as evidenced by BTC's dominance, these are relatively small. Tron also perfect counterpoint of most heavily used chain w/ no SoV properties - TRX only ~3.4% ETH.

i was thinking the same. btc is dominant because people will buy it with no intention of using it, while ethereum seems to, in part, attract value based on utility. fragmented L2s with their own gas tokens dont necessarily drive value to the main chain, but to your point, interoperability will likely help.