Ethereum formally introduced the concept of smart contracts, and they had serious potential for modernizing financial contracts and push back an entire predatory industry of leechers, but instead it was used to create meme-coins and scam coins and ruined it all.

It's move to proof of stake instead of proof of work dramatically reduced its energy usage, and makes it a actually scalable, but the masses lost interest when they couldn't just make money off a few GPUs and turned to the aforementioned shit-coins built on the Ethereum network.

Ethereum is not bad, it's one of the better ones. It's just kind of responsible for the explosion of shit/scam coins, because people are shitty scammers.