Use Case is Central on ETH's Road to Internet Money or Value Store

I posted a comment on why ETH shall not go down the road of ATOM. Surprisingly this topic is very contentious and I would like to have a chance to further elaborate my thoughts:

(1) ETH's road to Internet Money

There is no question that ETH needs to stay decentralized and censorship-resistant as Vitalik argued on the road to Internet Money. But is this enough? Guys from Defi camp like Uniswap, Frax, Lido have argued that Defi is critical part of that road. I would argue ETH needs to stay relevant as the central of Crypto chain activities, be it Defi or NFT or anything new. Otherwise early adopters will jump to other ecosystems and wide adoption will go straight into that ecosystem when the time comes. If a system is not used or not as performant or convenient to use, why would anyone trust it as internet money?

(2) ETH's road to Value Store

Still, there is no question that Ethereum chain has to stay decentralized and censorship-resistant for value storage. But ETH coin is inseparable from Ethereum chain, then if ETH is losing its user case as argued in (1), why could anyone use it as value store? Value store is still a store of things of value, and people needs to have incentives to hold ETH. And more, it cannot be use cases that does not accrete value to ETH, as what $ATOM failed at with its best giving-out-for-free Cosmos SDK. That people started to use Bitcoin as value store was because Bitcoin had a unique user case - the first chain that is decentralized and censorship-resistant and can handle payment. ETH came second, then decentralized and censorship-resistant alone would not be enough, and use cases & value accretion will have to be there to drive ETH adoption.

So even if ETH goal is value store, it still needs to become Internet Money first. Like US Dollar is international money as today, but foreign countries holding it as value store is not because it is value store, it's because they need to use USD for payment. Foreign countries mostly held GBP 100 years ago.