New technologies that shift the paradigm take a long time to really understand. The narrative around bitcoin is still really hard to grasp. Really the only metric we have for most cryptocurrencies is the price, and price is such an imperfect metric. What does actual utilization look like? Thats really the struggle for crypto right now.
This is actually what sets Bitcoin apart from it's rival Alt coins. Bitcoin is currently backed by a much larger network of users and merchants that supports it, but these Alt coins are built around 1 or 2 solutions and a small network of merchants and users.
The Bigger companies during the DotCom bubble had a stronger user base and focussed on multiple applications and solutions. The smaller companies was mostly hyped and built around single solutions and when the economy started to collapse, they took the biggest damage and they could simply not recover.
