It's still not really used for anything that really matters to anyone (in a business sense). Until now the high cost and low transaction volume meant that it was just not really suitable for its intended use as a transactional store of ledgers of stuff unless the stored entries were extremely high in value and relatively rare.
But on paper building something useful now is a bit easier as transaction cost is likely to come down and the network should support a more reasonable transaction volume.
When your global transaction volume per hour is capped below what even a small web server running on a tiny computer would easily handle, there isn't much you can do with it in the real world. And when those transactions then cost you tens/hundreds of dollars and take minutes/hours to clear, any utility that might exist goes out of the window. It's a complete non starter for anyone looking to do some transactions that actually have business value. Why would you? It's many orders of magnitude worse than what a plain old database gives you on all relevant dimensions.
That was the status quo up until the merge. Now that that is in the past, we'll see. I personally doubt Ethereum will be the tool of choice for this kind of thing. If you are serious about building something that does something useful, there are better tools available.
But on paper building something useful now is a bit easier as transaction cost is likely to come down and the network should support a more reasonable transaction volume.
When your global transaction volume per hour is capped below what even a small web server running on a tiny computer would easily handle, there isn't much you can do with it in the real world. And when those transactions then cost you tens/hundreds of dollars and take minutes/hours to clear, any utility that might exist goes out of the window. It's a complete non starter for anyone looking to do some transactions that actually have business value. Why would you? It's many orders of magnitude worse than what a plain old database gives you on all relevant dimensions.
That was the status quo up until the merge. Now that that is in the past, we'll see. I personally doubt Ethereum will be the tool of choice for this kind of thing. If you are serious about building something that does something useful, there are better tools available.