most companies don't want anything to do with crypto yet, not even bitcoin

I think that bitcoin dominance is actually part of the problem. Bitcoin has a lot of issues (wasteful energy usage, long transaction times, etc.) and crypto haters like to use those as easy attacks on crypto as a whole, so they're implicitly aligned with bitcoin maximalists in acting like coins that tried to address those problems don't exist. Some crypto enthusiasts might know a bit more, but many of them also treat some of the problems as features rather than bugs (high volatility, pump-and-dumps, etc.). So even if there are coins that have features that could be interesting or useful to someone that's often obscured by the polarized information environment. There's a weird chicken-and-egg thing where crypto opponents are doing their best to keep crypto walled-off from the rest of the economy until it settles down, but being disconnected from everything but traders and the financial industry perpetuates some of the problems.