I broadly understand this as the utopian vision of what crypto could theoretically be, but it's not playing out this way in the real world and I have a hard time seeing it ever succeeding this way.

Being able to leverage crypto on this scale requires everyone to either A) be technical enough to understand and use smart contracts directly or B) delegate a party that handles this for you. This is where the utopian case usually falls apart, because most people are B and this requires trusting a third party, which kinda defeats the entire point of the vision.

Because most people don't want to do the work of learning and managing crypto directly, a huge industry flourished to service these people, full of its own interests, corruption and various levels of criminality. And well-intentioned crypto people have no way to reign this industry in because the entire point is to operate in a deregulated way.

Ironically, the piece that makes crypto fundamentally unworkable 20 years in is capitalism.