Although projects like neo and eos received huge investments, they could not develop themselves at all, yes you are right, they were very uninspired, I don't think they will be very active in this rising season. Web 3 seems to continue to be an emerging trend, but also the need for me, the need will be an inevitable occurrence in it. I am impatiently following the evolutions of these defi,nft, metaverse technologies you mentioned.
I do not believe that their problem was that they were not good enough, it was that they did not catch up with the times. Right now the crypto world is so beyond them but they were the biggest names for a while. EOS for example got rated highest and best in blockchain for a while, early when they actually did something, so it is not that they are bad, they were never bad. The problem is we have so many new projects which are much better and EOS never improved itself.
This is the key to most projects fall, if you do not improve with the times then you are not going to be at a high level, only bitcoin could stay the same and still be ranked higher and even bitcoin is improving their blockchain to make it as cheap as possible, still not cheap but at least it is trying. This is why NEO and EOS could still get super popular only if they improved, but as it seems, they won't.