About the Ethereum future, Ethereum is the first Blockchain to implement Smart contract, which is a self executing contracts that requires a third party to enforce them.the open a new world for decentralized applications. However Ethereum is constantly updating new futures like proof-of-stake coming soon and sharding.
It is true that Ethereum is the first blockchain to implement smart contracts, but you need to know that so far Ethereum has not provided any development for some of the problems that occur in Ethereum and what is even worse is that currently there are more and more new blockchains with smart contracts and transactions that are faster and more expensive. which is cheaper, so that it will give Ethereum the potential to be beaten by new projects.
In this you are right, most of the altcoins previously based their project on the ERC-20 network, but I began to see that the other networks took on much more life than the others, such as the Binance network, the Solana network that is I feel like one of the blockchauin that has a good future, also because of its very cheap transactions because most of them like to use them, regarding the problems of the ETH network it is true, there was no more talk about it because those problems do not exist. They were escalated so that they could have a solution, so in view of this it can be said that things were much more difficult for Buterin, I think this is very difficult for them to be able to do it now.
The majority of projects when they came up with the NFT prefer a thousand times to use other networks, other blockchains so as not to be dependent on ETH, if we go to normal ETH because I think that the coin will have a very high value in the amount that the bitcoin makes its movement bullish as it should.