This means buying BTC is on the backburner, pushed far back behind the list of priorities.
This is why genuine usage with utility is far more important then all hyped bets on inflows to BTC, all the speculative judgements evaporate when liquidity dries up. This is true of a few different market priced assets and BTC has to be ranked as something speculative.
We do have population growth in BTC, its just far slower then the rapid speculative flows that sometimes occur, this base line is the backbone to BTC far more reliable and genuine then the peak action. Genuine population and usage has its own baseline and its slow and much lower pricing but thankfully this is what saves BTC from being purely 1 fragile thing.
Amen. Every time I'm spending my BTC on food deliveries (it's really the only thing I am doing right now, other than occasional gift card buys to shop online, which is getting rarer due to lack of options that suit me at bitrefill) I get that Starship Trooper meme in my head: "I'm doing my part!".
I definitely don't think whales buying or dumping have any long-term real impact at all. It's all those regular joes doing small transactions that keep holding the Bitcoin fort, really.