Ethereum gave birth to multi-purpose chains meaning the vast majority of crypto projects owe homage to Ethereum

Technically speaking, Bitcoin started it all. But the innovation in smart contracts and dApps all started with Ethereum.

All your favorite platforms, dApps, and NFT games owe homage to Ethereum.
Without Ethereum, most of the market would simply have blockchains like Bitcoin designed around one application that has the sole purpose of keeping track of digital money.

All chains that are competing against Ethereum right now got inspired by Ethereum in the first place. In fact, some of the most popular competitors have either founders or developers that were once building on Ethereum and decided to branch out and do their own thing.

And yeah Ethereum isn’t without its flaws. It is notorious for its high gas fees and overall scalability issues. But this is slowly becoming less and less of a problem seeing how fast scaling solutions have been developing new tech, especially in the ZK space with projects like Loopring and Zksync.
Polygon alone allocated a billion dollars solely for ZK tech development and currently has 4 ZK scaling solutions.

So in brief, if you have a crypto project that you love religiously, 99% of the time it is a project forked from, built on top of, or inspired by Ethereum. Never forget that.