Coming back to this now that I have a chance to respond, and it's too bad we naturally tend to see statements like this as either/or, rather than both/and, just to different degrees.

Zaps have definitely helped some with Nostr's adoption, and I agree with folks who point out that we need a way to natively transfer value to one another, and especially the devs building the Nostr tools we use, in order for this thing to be sustainable.

However, when it comes to new users onboarding to Nostr, I doubt the "Come to Nostr, we have zaps!" mantra is what draws most of them here.

Instead, I would bet that more people now are adopting Bitcoin because of their experience of zaps on Nostr than people adopting Nostr because it has zaps.