ETH is not just bad it is the worst because it doesn't have the fundamental characteristics of a cryptocurrency and it was never capable of delivering any of the promises it made: decentralization, immutability, utility, security, cheapness,... none of them exist in ethereum!
You say "smart contracts" but have you ever seen even a single one that has any utility in real world? Of course not because the only usage of Ethereum and its smart contracts is to create useless tokens to raise funds and scam people. So it remains the most useless cryptocurrency of all times.
Compare that with bitcoin or even a useless altcoin such as Doge for example, they solve a problem in real world. People can use bitcoin to transfer money in a decentralized way that noone can censor. They tried calling ETH a currency when it was failing back in 2017 but since its fees shot up higher than bitcoin's that scheme also failed.
There is some truth here, but I think you are exaggerating a bit.
For now, the 2 main implementations of ETH are DeFi and ICO, which failed imo.
I have always said that DeFi are basically useless (as you need to pay 100% collateral at least to be *somewhat* secure), and a 100% collateral loan is useless and has no application in the real world. Why would I lend 1 ETH to borrow 1 ETH back? lol Just for speculating purposes...
About ICO, they are an interesting concept. Smartcontracts controlling the fund raising, receiving Tokens back when you transfer eth and so on... But I believe all that could be done in Bitcoin. But they also failed imo as the space was mostly used by scammers.
However, Eth potential is huge and much bigger than those implementations. Just look at so many ETh copy-cats we have: ADA, waves, NEO, BNB, and probably a lot more (i don't know much about this shitcoin world lol).
The idea of running decentralized Apps (dApps), which are applications that once running cannot be stopped by anyone, is very interesting and has a lot of potential. Once we have (and if we have) oracles running delivering real world data into smartcontracts we will have some nice implementations.
But, for that to work, we need many things: Oracles, PoS, real scalability and real decentralization. I think ETH is now far from that... I still hold a few ETH, let's see where it will go in the next 5 years or so.
For now, Bitcoin is certainly the best bet. Bitcoin was able to do what is in the whitepaper almost 12 years ago: Censorship resistant, decentralized, open, borderless, cannot be shut down, etc.
People cry about slow/expensive transactions, but it is way better than ETH for example.