Manipulation exists in all sorts of speculative assets otherwise the market would not move. The point is that those who are trading for long have understood how this system works. If you basic knowledge and understanding of a project and its use cases is good you should be able to decide whether you can keep it for long term or short term.
Once you have the faith in that asset, like bitcoin you can get the drive to buy it when the market falls = avoid FUD and sell at the pump = profit the FOMO but not buy it.
Therefore practice to understand the market emotions and how you can use them. Remember that whales only start the manipulation but it is driven by smaller fries and then whales feed on that.
Manipulation "exists" in the sense that it is not allowed to do publicly and like a crazy person, you end up doing it like you pay the media people to promote something or downplay something etc etc, like you do it secretly and you do not do it like crazy. For example in crypto, you could go up on twitter (or any other place that people can see you) and say that you will buy a billion dollars worth of bitcoin in a week and nobody will do anything about it, and if you are really rich and super known, that will still not be a problem, it is still a fine thing.
At the end of the day, manipulation is done in everything but nothing is as relaxed as bitcoin and crypto world, you could literally play with money in front of people's eyes here and ruin or increase a whole coin and nothing will happen to you, that type of freedom to manipulate doesn't exist anywhere else.