The word scam gets thrown around very willy nilly in cryptocurrency and I feel like there are several different levels to scamming and intent really matters. A project with good intentions thats down in marketcap isnt necessarily a scam to me.
Yes, some projects just fail. We can't blame every failure on scammers. Some teams just don't have what it takes, or maybe it's just that there are too many projects and most of them are not unique or interesting.