I understand that with speculative cryptos you can lose part of or all of your investment, but is the risk limited to the amount i laid out?
Yes if only your aren't engage in other advance trading experience like margin trading. Investing just by trading on spot exchanges or buying of tokens can only cost you your initial funds in case it was a bad investment and market has declined to bring the price down. Do understand that unless the token had been delisted from all exchange or they lack liquidity that prevents your from selling since there's no buyer available, you would mostly have some funds to left in the token.
Cryptocurrencies are subjective to risk, the stablecoin aren't no different since they lose and gain value too although their state of stability gives more assurance than other cryptocurrencies out there including bitcoin.
A hyper volatile crypto market allows certain coin to go up for 10,000% and go down disappear to the dust. This is actually what most exchange warned about.
A margin trading and its leverage is indeed an advanced trading which it's not for newcomer, op seems have no idea about this though.
He might have heard his friends or colleagues telling him that they lost the whole salary in crypto + seeing those warning messages makes him paranoid.
If you compare it to the traditional market which limited the max loss to certain percentage then crypto is indeed high risk, but if you do understand crypto and had some trading experiences in crypto market.. I'd say the risk is just average.