The upbeat attitude of bitcoin holders now is better and more mature than was few years ago. So, bitcoin becomes hard to lose value or atleast crashes as once did (hopefully).
I do not know I was not around in those years but there seems to be a lot more speculators and people that want to obtain fast profits and those people are always the first to let go of their bitcoin when it seems the price is going to go down, so I do not know if your statement is true.
I dont think so, people are just depending on the profit that they can get, so whenever bitcoin is down they will find another way to invest and whenever bitcoin has a higher price they keep on holding their bitcoin.