I very much struggle to think of an application for blockchain (by which I mean a distrubuted ledger and consensus) which isn't better served by some other appr

I very much struggle to think of an application for blockchain (by which I mean a distrubuted ledger and consensus) which isn't better served by some other approach, except for maybe the core thing they were created for: digital distributed coins. Almost every other application is better off with a different approach, because to interact with anything else in the world you need to trust some specific parties (not necessarily a single one), and at that point while there is quite plausibly value in having a distributed electronic ledger in terms of tamper-resistance, transparency, and efficiency, you might as well delegate consensus to those parties, since you must trust them anyway. If you do otherwise you basically just have made a worse solution (both economically, usually, because you wind up tying everything to some token or another, and technically, because blockchains have terrible capacity for transactions as well as many more risks of errors in whatever 'smart contracts' you concoct). And this has proven true in practice: blockchain has huge amount of money sloshing around due to the hype, and yet there really are basically no success stories in terms of applying it to acutally solve problems (there's plenty of people selling shovels during the gold rush, of course, but that doesn't represent value to anyone outside the space). They have shown some success as a means of exchange for those who cannot use the normal banking system, which primarily means criminal activity (though there is enough cases where at least it does not seem morally wrong, like escaping capital controls in countries without a stable currency), but this does not justify the valuation and especially does not justify the ranking of the current coins (note that monero, which arguably achieves the best privacy of any coin and sees a lot of use in this case, has a relatively low market cap because it's banned from most exchanges)