I never understood why bitcoin is winning popularity/pricing over ie. ethereum - which doesn't burn energy anymore and you can actually do programming on it, not just moving money from a to b.

Because it's based on narratives. Bitcoin has the strong narrative and the "network effect". Because bitoin keeps surviving, the narrative reinforces itself. At this point surely most people know, even if they're unwilling to admit or fooling themselves, the utility value is basically dead.

The utility value is now a pure gamble that a person tomorrow will pay me more than I paid for it today, thinking that a person in the future will pay them more than they paid. And that can be a powerful enough narrative to keep it going.

But if bitcoin disappeared today, 99.99999% of the world wouldn't even notice, that is how little of a problem it solves.

Anyway, the point is, imagine the scenario if ethereum overtook bitcoin in value. What will this actually do to the ecosystem? In my view, it would be catastrophic to the value of all coins, because it suddenly destroys the narrative of a "store of value" (the last lingering narrative). Any other coin could just overtake ethereum, and out of all the thousands of coins, which one? At that point, I think the whole thing comes down.

Bitcoin has a longer proof-of-work history, which is the only thing that secures any blockchain.

One theory backed with proprietary data is that it's because bitcoin was created by the US government and money printed by the Fed goes in bitcoin so the government will one day pay its projected $113T of debt by dumping on everyone.