In beginning of 2018 there were a lot of alcoins was launched in market, Most of them was just to scam people with typically referral method by social influencers.
This was also a flaw of Ethereum blockchain where any single person can create his own coin with his desired supply and name by costing very low fee.
As with the help of Ethereum blockchain where it was super easy to generate any coin it was easy to launch any ico with high promising goals and convince people to make their money multiple x.
Those scam or ordinary platform make alt market dirty game. And this impact very badly on the genion project where many traders lost their interest.
An altcoin can only be worthless or dead when the team want it to, that is, is it possible for someone to be working on a project, putting his efforts, money, time etc and the project still dies? The answer is NO. So everything comes down to the team playing their part, if they are willing to work, the project will continue surviving and so is the altcoin as well. On the other hand, there is no need to blame Ethereum blockchain for anything, humans are unpredictable and those creating scam projects were after money while some who created a good project were after the well-being of humans. Furthermore, there are still scam projects coming up everyday so there is need for due diligence at all times.