I agree with this. Sadly there is too much emphasis on this because people want to get rich quick. All this noise sometimes obscures that there are also genuine people building things.
There are many places around the world where citizens don’t have access to banking and the digital economy. For example Afghanistan:
I think its unfortunate that the taxpayers from the US and Europe spent 20.000.000.000.000 $ on the war there. And now Afghans can not even make an account on upwork.com and find work in the digital economy. 
I started working on an upwork alternative (using a Discourse forum) https://twitter.com/spirobel/status/1591350820708442112 It is not easy to overcome the network effects (especially as I can only work on this in my free time.)
But it is clearly a solution. Without crypto it would have been very hard to pay someone living there and build trust. The barrier to installing a wallet app is way lower than doing a remittance.
I just wish people were less cynical and just built things 
I made a subscriptions plugin for Discourse that uses Monero: https://twitter.com/spirobel/status/1595949928634667008
You can try it with stagenet coins at https://forum.monerochan.news
I could also make it compatible with other currencies if someone is interested.
That is indeed the right solution. Discourse is very tied to email. So it would be hard to patch out the mandated necessity for a confirmed primary email. I investigated this question a while ago and found it would be much easier to create a user with a placeholder email and set active to true (aka user has a confirmed email).