The fact that it is an evolutionary step for mankind is overly dramatic. The opposable thumb thing is a phase. People said the same thing about keyboards and carpal tunnel years ago. Its a phase.
People are fucking idiots if they want to use technology to recreate mundane chores in a virtual world.
Yes but the point is, that it is an adaptation to the makeup of a human no matter how early it is in that process. Ok, maybe we can agree on something like "minor evolutionary phase". In science, the smallest of changes are very important for future learning. Basically, how we use our thumbs now is very different since the incarnation of handheld devices. Gaming has also attributed to this but it has accelerated via smartphones due to them very much being an extension to the human arm/hand. They are a semi-permanent to near permanent fixture now. Spending more hours with them (thanks to portability) than not.
Whilst I agree with some element there of your second paragraph, isn't that already happening in some shape anyway? Also, isn't a scale of mundanity purely just an expression of opinion anyway? What you may find a mundane chore/task, someone else will find enthralling (like washing a car or going to church) and quite possibly incredibly cathartic.
Also, other ideas of the metaverse are not purely based on "mundane chores" or similar. It's the wider implementation of data, combined with tech. It could be an event that you can't get tickets to in person...there are ideas of this with both AR (Augmented Reality) and VR using Virtual Gigs via live streams etc. but the vision (I believe) of the metaverse could be where your Virtual experience doesn't feel like a virtual one at all and people will eventually be able to attend an event without being there yet the whole environment will feel as if you are there - moreover, the concepts are reversed too, so the people who are there (friends for e.g) will feel as if you are also there too.
Yep, it's deep the further we look into it and a bit bloody scary in some elements (depending on who/how it could be used). For any of us (yes even Mark Zuckerberg included) to define what the metaverse will be in the future right now, would be like trying to say in the 1970s what the internet would eventually become today. Even if some of us happen to think we are Marty McFly.
We're not quite at "Ready Player One" type of stages yet but I guess if when watching something like "Minority Report" 20yrs ago, there were many physical things there that seemed inconceivable or at least very ahead of anything in the public domain. Tom Cruise wearing a form of SmartGloves and dragging live data around a large screen via gesture based actions. Samsung phones offer gestured motion AI today, like opening the palm of your hand to start recording a video. Google are continually refining their gesture based interfaces too and we already have the not quite perfect motion sensor based tech with Kinect and Wii.
Have in mind that Minority Report was supposedly set in the 2050s, some 100yrs ahead of the original series of stories by Philip Dick. The visionary Dick (careful now), is quite some writer and one of the stories from that Minority Report series could be closer still than the metaverse. In "The Days of Perky Pat" it features the survivors of nuclear war who are obsessed with re-creating a virtual replica of their lost world. Also see "The Penultimate Truth" by the same author.
Mundanity might be an accurate claim, in reference to idiotic humans but the reason why most good technology works, thrives and lasts is down to the simplicity and ease of operation at the user/consumer end.