Before we get into a discussion, there are some important points to be noted down. The primary one being, both Maker & Compound has lower maximum supply and they can be relatively controlled by the whales who has a few millions in their wallets through a targeted attack. Moreover, both these networks are popular because they brought new technological changes to the industry be it in terms of "single collateral DAI" or "decentralized money markets with algorithmically set interest rates". But to be honest, neither Maker nor Compound were shit projects which was pumped exclusively for profits like BAYC (even vitalik is worried about these monkeys going for $100k+ with absolutely no use case to the real world lol). Uniswap, just like MKR or COMP brought a ground breaking innovation to the industry and successfully tried to create a more decentralized structure for trading of crypto assets with the help of Liquidity Providers.
But as you stated above, the interest in Defi or DAO based coins are diminishing to quite an extent and the primary reason for this market turnover can be linked over to the bear market in general rather than increasing gas fees. For example, inexperienced traders or the one relatively new to this web3 space would always stick to cheaper blockchains like Solana or BSC sacrificing the decentralization aspect even if ETH moves to POS in the upcoming days. But, more experienced traders would prefer to stay in decentralized blockchains like BTC or ETH by paying higher gas fees. In addition to that, the real innovation happens in decentralized blockchains and cheaper blockchains just tend to copy the innovations by masking them with cheaper fees to attract new & inexperienced traders.
Concluding that, in my opinion governance tokens like UNI, COMP or MKR are still a good long term investment because they reinvented the wheel and along with that they weren't targeted for new investors who trades only during the bull market. We are in the accumulating phase for these tokens and there is a higher possibility these will soar in near future.
Old governance tokens have the fundamentals to stand the test of time. Even though there's not much interest in them because of the bear market, I believe they will reach higher prices in the future due to "De-Fi" maturing as a serious alternative to centralized finance. Maker, Compound, and Uniswap were all pioneers of this movement. Other projects simply copied them (eg: PancakeSwap, JustSwap, USDJ, etc) to take advantage of the situation. Their popularity is only attributed to the low fees in their underlying Blockchain networks. But the original ones are still the best option if you're looking for reliability, security, and decentralization.
I've never accumulated COMP nor MKR, mainly because of the high ETH gas fees. But now that things have changed, it wouldn't hurt buying and "hodling" these tokens to cash them out within the next bull market. All of the original projects are decentralized, so I'm pretty sure they will improve both in terms of functionality and performance over time. Who knows what the future holds for the entire crypto/Blockchain industry? Just my thoughts