Unless anyone can produce any real evidence of "manipulation" (which I have yet to see) having any effect on the market, these claims of manipulation must be considered to be fantasy.
People are very susceptible to confirmation bias. They see what they want to believe and tend to ignore evidence to the contrary. Read about
"street light interference" and be amazed.
I completely disagree. I would personally be very surprised if there
weren't any market manipulation happening in the crypto markets. While there is definitely genuine market movement happening, there are organizations holding enough Bitcoin to create big buy or sell walls in exchanges to control the flow of trade. It is not a hard thing to do, all you need is control over a big enough amount of the currency you are trying to trade. On GDAX, for example, many buy and sell order for the BTC/USD pair get dropped and created in a whim, and the timings lead me to believe it is all planned. Of course, I have no hard proof, but it seems much more likely to me that it is happening rather than that it is not.