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.

Note that I specifically mention "chiefly SoV" as the leading financial application. This does not require active chain activity - just hold, like BTC. While ETH has more demand vectors than BTC, this is still the dominant one, and anciliary high-value DeFi also infrequent and insensitive to fees for large players.