The bottom line is that altcoins can no longer be considered copycats or reinventions of the same cryptocurrency wheel. Many of them represent compelling use cases beyond just payments and whether long-term feasible or not are dead serious about chasing investment capital.
They sure are, but none of the altcoins are going to be at the same good price over long term. Hardly anyone uses altcoins except for trading. Most just use bitcoin. Altcoin price hike is currently only temporary and probably has always been.