If it's centralized, it cannot be considered an "Ethereum Killer". Solana often sacrifices decentralization in favor of fast speeds and low fees. While ETH became less-decentralized with the transition to PoS, it's still the most reliable smart contract platform in the world. I believe that's ETH's main selling point. The constant network outages and the FTX collapse has led to a massive downfall in Solana's price.
I doubt it will get back on its feet unless developers address inherent issues on the blockchain. Once Solana becomes a reliable smart contracts platform, it will have the opportunity to rise among the top-ranked coins in market cap (probably within the top 5). Things will be even better if FTX makes a comeback. The future is widely unpredictable so we can only hope for the best.
Yes, the collapse of FTX and the fall in the price of solana did not increase the credibility of the project, but the main thing is that solana continues to develop and the developers have not left the project. Now it is difficult to compare eth and sol, because ethereum has been on the market for a long time and is well established as a reliable project, but remember the history when etc appeared. I think that solana will have a good future in some time.
Yeah true, there was a lot of chaos that happened within the last few years that involved SOL, between freezing of the chain, the FTX deal and so forth it became very hard for SOL to get some attention and love from the community. It's understandable and I think I can see why people do not want to put a lot of money into it, but at the same time some other coin that had this much trouble would have been gone, it would have been out of top 100 by now and would be hated.
So, the fact that all this happened to SOL and it still stands its rank shows that it is one of the stronger coins and we should be liking it. Not saying that you should invest into it, if you do not want to invest into it then I would understand, I sold mine as well because I did not want to see it tested once more with some problem, there is no guarantee that it would have survived that as well, could have gone down this time around so I didn't want to be around when that happens.
However, as a person who doesn't have any, and not plan on buying any, I could still give their credit for building something that is good and doing fine, and even when it's facing some troubles, they are really doing a good job not crashing. There has been so many coins that faced lesser troubles and just crashed to near zero levels, this means that SOL faced harder troubles and didn't crumbled and liking it for that reason is not really a bad decision and I respect anyone who buys some.