ETH got more supports due to the fact that the system caters more projects and new developers are mostly using this chain, and like what you have said, waves is not performing that much and with competitions behind the team needs to work it out and bring new progress or provide attracting offers and try to keep providing updates that will engaged old and new investors to gathered interest to bring new money and start the pumped, it will surely get attentions and it will start the talk back with this coin.
Waves had a chance to grow when ICO was still popular but it was left behind by ETH with a very huge gap although we see waves grew that time but it wasn't as big as the growth of ETH, so basically Waves has to improve more to in order to compete with the greatest platform and maybe pump when the bull run arrive.
ETH was more popular because it was more popular,,, when ICO scammers wanted to do a project they just realized everyone had ETH and it was the easiest to ICO on. Waves was actually even much easier, to be honest, especially with the lite wallet integration that accepted BTC and ETH and other coins BUT people did not know about it and well, long story short, people always go for the obvious!
I guess you are right, aside from it's popularity, its easy to use the platform so the scammers use both for their advantage.
However, we can't also deny that there are a lot of good projects using ETH platform and slowly their build their own chain, like for example, BNB was using ETH platform before then have their own change.
Though ETH dropped a lot, I still don't think Waves can beat ETH.