The latest rumour going around about the Ethereum merge is a dump after, you are wrong if you are one of them, Ethereum going proof of stake and fixing the high gas fee have automatically turn this project into a GOLD, every whales will want to stake and enjoy the rewards, even if a dump happens after the so called fork it won't last.
Staking is becoming the thing today and everyone wants to have their share to have a passive income. But when PoS comes, this will make the richer rich as they will have the biggest share if they're holding a lot of Ethereum. We will know what will happen next after the merge but if we're talking about long term, ETH is still strong and likely to stay on its place because many will come back for its purpose of having one of the cheapest fees in the market and that will create volume.
The advantage that ethereum has over other platforms and coins is probably enough to keep it in second place only behind bitcoin, but it is not clear if this move is the correct one, because now the ones that are going to benefit the most out of this are the ones that have a lot of coins already and this could cause that a great deal of people decide to move to other platforms because they are not going to like to see a minority earning all the profits while they earn nothing while staking their coins.