I believe it's a combination of all 4 scenarios that you listed. However imho, the whales manipulation is playing a very big in why crypto is in a bearish thrend. You never know when the whales will decide to say END to this dip and bring BTC back to 10K or more. We've seen this happen multiple times in the past and I'm sure that it will happen in the future too.
The whales decide when to end the bull markets because they have so many coins that they can crash the price if they want, but they cannot decide when the bull market begins because they do not have control over all the people that right now are deciding to not invest in bitcoin because they are afraid, so they are doing what any reasonable person will do, which is to take advantage of the prices and buy all the coins they can afford.