I am job hunting now and it seems like half of the companies reaching out to me are involved with DeFi. I have stayed far away from the crypto space because I have yet to see a valid use case for it in my own life, and of the plethora of scams in the space. I’ve read numerous threads here where people debate the usefulness of DeFi and crypto.
From what I can tell, there is one use case that DeFi is actually useful, and that is acting as the financial infrastructure for people in emerging markets who don’t have access to any traditional banks or lenders. This alone isn’t enough to convince me though because as it stands, anyone with access to traditional finance infra should continue to do so as you get far more assurances through auditing, and US federal support like FDIC.
Can someone explain to me a specific situation in which someone in a western country would want to use DeFi outside of speculative investing?
The gatekeepers to achieving this (aka "liquidity providers") are waiting there to extract their pound of flesh and in doing so often destroy any value proposition of crypto and make traditional banking look just as good if not better.
To finally answer your question, any practical, real world argument for DeFi is severly limited in my experience and is on the verge of being shrunk even further.