Why was Ethereum created?

I'm writing my Bachelors' thesis about On-Chain analytics and its impact on automatic trading bots that use machine learning.

While writing the Introduction, I was wondering how Ethereum came to be. There is a lot of literature on how it's useful and what benefits it has over chains that do not support smart-contracts. But I'm struggling on finding the why, as in why did Vitalik came up with the idea and if there are any citeable resources for that.

For contrast, when describing why Bitcoin exists, one could argue and say that the financial crisis of 2008 motivated Satoshi to create Bitcoin.

So I was wondering if there are any resources I should know about why Ethereum exists.