Of course the volume in USD terms is important but you are comparing the trade volume on exchanges to the actual usage of the blockchain. Trade volume does not equal adoption.

The volume on exchanges are mostly just speculative trading and it is done off-chain. I find it quite amusing that you dismiss the data that shows that BTC is used less than other blockchains for peer to peer interactions.

Think of it this way, if one the one hand you have one large whale buying 1 million dollars worth of BTC and just HODLs and on the other hand you have one thousand people using steem (or any other blockchain) for their daily interactions which one would you say has more adoption?

I am not dismissing the importance of BTC in the crypto world (anyone that does it is a fool) but the fact that a whole pack of platforms have orders of magnitud more on-chain transactions than BTC is indisputable.