I think that at the bottom of the trough people will stop caring about it altogether except for functionality that has been proven to be useful for

You're describing the "plateau of productivity", which is built into this theory:

From this trough of disillusionment the new technology then starts climbing the “slope of enlightenment” where people realistically reassess how the technology can be applied in useful ways, before it reaches the “plateau of productivity” where the new technology is incorporated into the market and and ideally starts to slowly pay off and grow.

and I agree with you! it's clear that there are good use cases for AI (see this article i posted in Science), we just need to apply it correctly and not overpromise!