As it's said, "Patience is a virtue". We as "hodlers" of Bitcoin should be patient in order to see better results in the future. But, what if Bitcoin never reaches a new ATH? Then, I'm afraid that most people "hodling" Bitcoin will lose all of their investment in the long run.
Bitcoin is still in the early stages, even though some think 10 years is a long time, which is true if we look only from the perspective of the duration of human life. But your thinking just showing that most people see BTC only as an investment, and they are in a panic when price is not going up. I would like to see a much bigger price in the next 5-10 years, but if this does not happen it won't be the end.
People will lose their money only if price is go down, but they always have a choice to sell today or any time they want. No one is saying that investing in BTC is not a risk, quite the opposite. Only invest what you are prepared to lose, so there will not be losses and disappointments in the long run.
One very big problem in 2017 was slow transaction speeds and high fees, if you reed around the internet you see alot of threads/discussions talking about this problem. Today its probably a bit faster but not that much, this would mean that 20k today with the same bullrun would cause the same problem, so you could argue that we cant see 20k today because we havent fixed the problem we had 2017.
Another big problem was exchanges, in 2017 the exchanges couldnt handle the traffic, this became a big problem, today we have stronger exchanges with alot better servers and staff, however the transaction speed and cost is still a problem. We also have alot of problems with exchanges get hacked, Decentralized exchanges is also something we need.
No doubt 2017 bull run is caused very big problem with transaction cost and slow confirmation, but part of problem was also in big spam from BCH which aimed to show how their BTC is better/faster/cheaper than original. It is also fact that we did not have SegWit then, and most exchanges did not use batch transaction. But I hope exchanges learn something from that time, especially with regard to better infrastructure.
The next bull run will show how much progress we have made since 2017, but there is no doubt that we are in a much better situation than two years ago, and that there is still time for improvement.