By the dot-com crash in 2000, there were a myriad of clear use cases for the Internet that normal people—those not particularly tech-savvy, and especially not those directly financially invested in Internet companies—used and recognized as very helpful.

Bitcoin has now been around for, what, 13 years? And aside from a very brief explosion of hype around NFTs that most people were fairly quickly able to recognize as nothing but more "greater fool" scams, most people not directly financially invested in blockchain projects either don't know or care blockchain exists, or see it as a bad thing.

I don't know about the very early days, but since 1990 Internet adoption (globally) has only gone up.

Some stocks crashed, some specific sites went away, but the people involved just reorganized and made even more successful businesses.

If 50%+ of Internet users decided to disconnect that could cause some real problems.

Which early internet crash event are you referring to?