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.
Whales cannot continue the market for ever. With each and every time that they dump their coins and limit the upside for others, their power to control the market declines. They will not be able to buy their coins on the cheap after every crash.
There is no point in worrying about the short term volatility in Bitcoin's price.
But that assumes that they do not get back into the market when the price is very low which is precisely what I think they are doing right now, they are doing it in a way to not bring attention to what they are doing, they are letting everyone that wants to get out of the market to do so while they are the ones that are buying those coins because they know that the price is going to eventually go up again and they're going to obtain massive profits as they have always done so.