First off, it's worth noting that Ethereum does have the first mover advantage for DeFi and that's in fact, the real reason why people still prefer it to other innovative opportunities (along with the fact that it's battle tested and secure ^). But these doesn't mean we should completely ignore other interesting alternatives that benefit people even more. For instance:
- NEAR protocol has a growing Defi economy that is spearheading by Ref Finance ( core AMM, swao, farm with awesome rewards!, others, etc) amongst others and that's not even the best part. Rather than compete against Ethereum, they've a solution that builds upon the current struggle of ETH network and makes it better for the ETH community thanks to Aurora - L2 solution on ethereum that uses NEAR under the hood to make transactions super cheap, affordable even for the average user and lightening fast sub 1 second finality.
The goal of defi shouldn't be about giving rewards to miners for fees when there's also impermanent loss to watch out for.
That's precisely the reason why most people still use "De-Fi" on ETH. This is good because it strengthens the ETH ecosystem. But it's also bad because it increases network load. Fortunately, there are solutions to tackle the high gas fees and slow confirmation times on the Ethereum blockchain.
Of course, we cannot ignore alternative smart contract platforms like Binance Chain and Solana. They may lack decentralization and censorship-resistance, but they're extremely convenient for "De-Fi" due to their high transaction capacity and cost-efficiency. You can use "De-Fi" on the aforementioned platforms for small amounts of crypto, while using ETH for larger amounts. That way you can minimize risks of loss as much as possible. Ultimately, "De-Fi" is all about bringing banking to the unbanked. As long as it fulfills its purpose, nothing else matters. Just my opinion