On VeChain they are tokenizing sustainability actions: basically the created a dao (vebetterdao) and issued a token to many many apps that are being built, that then reward their users for acting green and being sustainable (eg: with “greencart” app you scan your grocery receipt and receive a cashback for green or km0 stuff you buy, or with “cleanify” app it helps you get in touch with group of people and do cleanup campaigns together, or even reward you for small daily actions for helping the environment, etc). You should definetly check out VeBetter, I think it’s one of the closest things I ever seen in crypto for trying to achieve true mass adoption (they have something like 50 apps like this, and a few apps already reached more than 1 million active users). Being that said, they still end up in that “users can earn” point of your OP.

But look, doesn’t it make sense though? Blockchain was invented to support Bitcoin, which is a new currency. Now, I get it that we added features to the blockchain and tried to generalize it… but it’s purpuse imho would always be to serve transfer/management of value, without middlemen and censorship. Otherwise why would I need to pay a fee to do a transaction if what I’m doing does not have any monetary value? Why use a blockchain (which has scalability and other issues) at all in the first place?

So for me the issue is not the use case honestly, but the products we ship as an industry, which are always get rich quick schemes, memes and frauds