What is the Goal/Purpose of Ethereum?

I’m new to all of this so please forgive my ignorance. I just wanted to put some fundamentals to the community in order to better understand things. The first is in the title, does Ethereum have an overarching goal or purpose?

Maybe I’m incorrect about this, but the big revelation I had (10 years too late) was that compute power is the new money printer in the 21st century. ETH 2.0 seems to be moving away from this with PoS. My second question is how will ETH be created in ETH 2.0? On a side note the barriers of entry for staking in 2.0 seem pretty high, and that’s coming from what you would call a very lucky westerner.

I do have a few questions about PoW, but I’ll leave those for another post. Regarding that though, it seems to be a fundamental requirement of a decentralized currency. Coming from a humanitarian perspective, PoW seems fundamental to the largest opportunity for good. It at the very least drives growth of decentralized computing powered by renewables. It seems to me the real world changing cryptocurrency will be the one that is “printed” by all citizens globally, most likely on all types of hardware. It’s seems if Ethereum wanted to grow as a currency it would expand mining, not get rid of it.

My final question is regarding the title “World Computer”. Why is it called that? I appreciate it is a giant global network of computers. Can it do any useful work beyond mining and validating? It seems there would be opportunity to use the “world computer” in times of need when great amounts of compute power are beneficial, like say a vaccine.