I think you are mistaking 'waiting for technology/infrastructure to mature enough to make them accessible to everyone' with 'technology that people don't know how to do something useful with'.
Notably, according to crypto evangelists. No one thought the internet was a fad. It had a time when it was novel and therefore people who didn't know how to use it would make fun of it, but absolutely no one who used it thought it was a 'fad'. As soon as the first web browser became accessible to consumers the dot com era exploded. There is a difference between 'didn't hit mass adoption due to massive infrastructure needing to be built in real time' and 'we don't know what this is useful for'.
Anyone who was a nerd in the 80s and early 90s knows that we spent the better part of two decades being told that the internet was no more revolutionary than fax machines and that most people would never use it.
Some op-ed pieces and getting mocked by people for being a nerd do not demonstrate to me a fundamental disagreement about the usefulness of the internet amongst people who understood what it was. Ignorance is annoying, but it is easily remedied by exposure and knowledge.
Contrast this with a cryptocurrency technologies, which are completely understood at this point and still lack legit real-world use at scale beyond speculation and yet it is constantly claimed that 'it just takes time for brilliant technology to find a use case'.
As far as I can recall, this has never been the case in the modern world -- every paradigm changing technology has had an immediate and obvious application where it greatly surpassed anything before it, regardless of if it took years or decades to build infrastructure and educate people on how to use it.
I suppose it depends on how you're defining the first year of the internet, but I don't remember many people thinking it was a fad. I'd say it's the one invention in my life that has actually lived up to the hype.
