In beginning of 2018 there were a lot of alcoins was launched in market, Most of them was just to scam people with typically referral method by social influencers.
Those scam or ordinary platform make alt market dirty game. And this impact very badly on the genion project where many traders lost their interest.
I think that 2018 was still quite OK in terms of the number of upcoming projects in comparison to the 2020 and 2021 hype around new tokens. The reason why 2018 was better in my opinion is pretty simple. Back then most of the new and upcoming altcoins at least tried to offer some use case and functionality to it's users. Of course a lot of them are dead again ow but at least they tried to achieve something.
In the last two years though it were mostly useless meme-coins that were created and the reason for that was not because they were needed but because the creators wanted to make some quick and dirty money without putting any effort in. Thank god that hype is over and more than 99% of those shit-coins are dead again already.