There are two spectacular use cases: gambling and illicit transactions

That's not snark, those are great use cases, both have thousands of years of popularity behind them and tons of demand.

Hence my parent comment, which points out that when you use the more heavily regulated centralized exchanges like coinbase the one remaining use case is gambling.

In all seriousness, in what way is defi interacting with the non-defi world right now to provide value? I'm not too informed about the space, but from a distance it seems like every defi innovation so far is just building on top of something else in the defi space.

Classic answers like "banking the unbanked in third world countries" don't seem to be shaking out yet.

The cypherpunk crowd on HN seems to be all but gone. Overwhelmingly negative takes on anything crypto-related in favor of... big banks and media conglomerates.