I've said this before = and I'll say it again - TESLA has survived the last 5 years by selling cars to technology people and fanboys who want the snake oil they sell.
As someone who has a love/hate relationship with Tesla I'd say technology people mostly ran out a little over a year ago. Speaking directly from the experiences within this forum. It definitely switched to a more demanding base.
It was also last year that the true snake oil appeared. Before FSD there was some degree of snake oil in that Elon sold people on features before they became available. Like when I purchased the Supercharger network was mostly an idea where there were only a few dozen of them. Nothing like it is today.
Part of buying an electric car was having faith in the future of it, and I knew this when I bought it.
I definitely agree with you that the Model 3 will either make or break Tesla. But, they did address a lot of problems by making the Model 3 far simpler, and easier to repair. They removed all the items that had a tendency to have problems. Currently the only issue I know about with the Model 3 is fit/finish issues that they need to improve on as it goes into production.
I don't see anything about the Model 3 (aside from FSD) as snake oil.
They put all the potentially snake oil stuff in whatever amazing battery technology they have for the roadster 2.0, and the Semi. If that stuff is truly snake oil then Tesla will most certainly break.
As to competition we're sadly still a year or more away from it. Having competition will most certainly help those of us who want a high level of quality. I'm not loyal at all to Tesla, and in fact I just spent the money I had reserved to upgrade from 2015 70D on an entirely different kind of vehicle.
Tesla didn't make the progress I expected them to on the Model S so I decided I'd downgrade to the Model 3 in the future (or an Audi/Porsche if price/specs/charging network are better).
The lack of competition is the biggest problem since the OP can't go to anything else without giving up something significant (electric power, range, etc). I could never switch back to an ICE car, and I think a lot of us can't. I''m most certainly a fanboi of electric power (electric longboards, ebikes, electric cars, etc), but not Tesla itself.