Despite the fact that in 2017 there were many good ICO projects that have been successfully developed so far, and now there are many good DeFi projects that will be developed in the future, most projects fail.
Not really true. Only a handful of 2017 projects (less than 100) survived without the creator running away with their coins collected during ICO. Even though some of them had the real potential they didn't care about the investors and scammed everyone outright. Many manged to survive till the end of 2019 before the pandemic has begun and many ran away during the bearish market of 2018. Many ICOs made successful promises during the start of 2018 and some managed to achieve that, but some or the other insider of the startup played a game and completely destroyed the reputation of the company.
I remember Oyster Pearl, Sykfchain, Elysian and many others eventually turning out into a scam and the price of a coin plummeting below a few satoshis. All these projects had the potential and if they didn't scam the investors, they could have something good with the money collected during ICO. Now the Defi trend is similar to ICO trend but here many of the developers remain anonymous so that they can run easily during the failure. YAM was a stupid coin and everyone were warned that there the contract wasn't audited and the coin should be maintained at the price tag of $1. But none of the newbie investors listened to that and pumped a $1 coin to $160 before analyzing the bug.
Only a few coins like Monero and ETH (apart from Bitcoin) have a little potential in this world, apart from that everyone are forks or just a new shitcoin to scam investors