Any writing that says all cryptocurrency is one thing is likely touching only one side of the elephant and missing out on all the other use cases and perceptions. The idea that something has to be built on top of a cryptocurrency to be useful is a very etherium sort of ideology. And by the time the etherium memes had come into play the traditional finance speculators had hijacked things off-chain to their normal markets domain and made it so nothing new could be created in the cryptocurrency space (post 2015).