For the first 18 months they could have just logged into the site and withdrawn instantly. It was only when we did the second part of the shutdown and disabled the dice game that the site broke so we've been forced to put a manual withdrawal system in place. Maybe the Elon Musk pump and dump scheme has something to do with the laggards suddenly remembering they left some DOGE somewhere.
It is 100% obvious that people who didn't cared at all during that period started to suddenly care about their doge amounts only because doge went high, that is literally the only reason and nothing else really. I personally have seen many people who "discovered" that they had doge in the past 6 months or so, because they put it somewhere and totally forgot about it, since it didn't worth any money in the past.
I had a friend who had over 50k doge, he didn't care because it wasn't even like 50 bucks when he bought it, and just put it aside and didn't care, at some point that was like what? 30k dollars at top? I don't really know because I didn't calculated but the sudden spike of amount of people who are going around trying to find their doges only caused by price of doge suddenly increasing. If the price was still the same, they wouldn't even care for their balance at freedoge.