As "digital gold", Bitcoin has been regarded only as a store of value for many years.

Has anyone ever thought that this was an act of necessity?

Is it possible that Bitcoin once had the means and opportunity to have a prosperous ecosystem and complex applications like Ethereum, but was "forced" to be stopped?

This was a major decision made by Satoshi Nakamoto before he retired - for the sake of security (to avoid potential denial of service attacks), a series of original operation codes (OP Codes) were disabled. These operation codes were used for binary operations and complex calculations, and could have enabled the writing of advanced scripts.