Well, this question is not so much about altcoins as such as about free and unrestricted competition between cryptocurrencies, by and large, bitcoin included. I think it is the first time in the modern history when it is possible to see how currencies can compete against each other without government intervention promoting one coin and trying to compromise another. If I'm not mistaken, right now we have over 1000 different cryptocurrencies. I don't know about you but to me it is an obvious overkill, a lot more than we will ever need, for real life. So how are things going to develop in the coming years? Will most of these currencies die out eventually and thus their total number is going to decline dramatically or will we always have an influx of a shitload of new coins?
What should we expect from cryptocurrencies on the scale of years or even decades? How many will be there and how many do we actually need?
There are over 3000 different Cryptocurrency. The coinmarket lists only about 1900 Cryptocurrency and there are many but not enough requirements to list there. But more than 80% are altcoins that do not have the product to serve life and of course as you say. All will die by the time and only the good altcoin and the product will survive and be applied to life
If it were so, most of these shitcoins would have long been gone. Have you ever wondered why there are still over 3000 cryptocurrencies (let's assume that what you say is true), which is by any sane metric a mighty overkill? If we consider the fact that the "estimated time to death" (average lifespan of a shitcoin) is around one year or even less than that, we would by now have a clean landscape where wouldn't be so many shitocoins, only the deserving ones (give or take a couple coins).
In essence, it means that when a shitcoin dies a new one is born, which takes the place of the deceased one. It leads us to a conclusion than competition doesn't really weed out these coins as we intuitively expect. It simply doesn't work in the way we hope.