Hi! Metaverse builder here! (In my career I've helped build There.com, OLIVE, IMVU, and Roblox.) I no longer work directly in this business, so I've managed to get some distance on that particular phenomena, which I believed strongly enough in to spend 20 years of my life on.

Will someone uproot their real life to live virtually, wearing a Scuba mask for work 8 hours a day, drink virtual coffee, and send the kids to virtual Video Game High School using a virtual jetpack?

No.

Well, at least not until we get “cable in the brain, we might as well be living in the matrix” level interface technology.

Virtual worlds are great to fill in spaces missing in the real world. Some people have fewer real-life friends who are like them, locally. They can find friends online! And in 3D, it's more immediate! This is great! Some people are a boy / girl / dragon on the inside but a cat / octopus / businessman on the outside. In various societies (even in “western” countries,) those people can't be who they really feel like, in the real world. But online, they can! This is great! Some people need to communicate with high bandwidth, in a space that allows one to easily illustrate / re-configure geometry for concept communication. A good enough metaverse could fill this space better than Zoom, assuming everyone who needed it was on board. This would be swell!

But, I can take a zoom call while I'm driving. I can drop off the kids while on the way to the grocery store. My desk and keyboard don't lock up the sweat into my face. The precision of a 2D CAD application is much more applicable to mechanical design work than a laggy, imprecise, jittery handheld 6DOF controller.

The metaverse will fill some niches where it hasn't managed to go yet. Some of those niches are pretty big (Play! Entertainment! Mass market interactive education experiences!) Some of those are small (Planning a movie shoot or special forces operations mission.) But they wont' take over the real world, they will, at best, augment it and accelerate it.

Now, regarding “crypto” worlds: All the NFT / decentralized nonsense, just like some centralized virtual real estate things before it (like Project Entropia?) seems to me to be a perfect cover for real-world transactions. If I'm going to pay you for a kilo of coke, will you send me a receipt so I can show where the money went? No, you will send me a totally unique obviously very valuable NFT, virtual land package, or share in a decentralized business on the block chain. See, totally legit! Future-looking investment! No money laundering happening here, no sir-ee!

(And I say this as a crypto HODL-er since 2012, so it's not like I'm against the general idea of cryptographically assured minimum-cost-of-fungibility as a transactional primitive!)