dApps are still the point of smart contracts, right?

I mean, anyone who’s read the original Ethereum whitepaper knows about what smart contracts are meant to empower blockchains to do. I kind of feel like several years have gone by, and there has been more projects that involve copying what someone else did, as opposed to just reading the instructions, and building and improving on one of those things. I know pump-and-dump memecoins was not what Vitalik was thinking when he put Szabo’s concept of smart contracts on the blockchain. Are there still serious projects doing things in 2024, that understand what the underlying design is?