Dogecoin gained popularity due to its low cost as well as its welcoming community.
Dogecoin gained popularity because one billionaire was bored one day and he thought to make joke about meme coin on the twitter. The billionaire is none than Elon Musk who made the craziest funny jokes about DOGE coin and it's possible applications in his virtual space. It got pumped like crazy because peeps thought that it has billionaires back and they can safely earn millions of dollars out of it.
Only few of them were able to gain huge amount of money from this incidence. I mean they might have been investing DOGE at right time and opportunity. Those who were going FOMO did investments at very wrong times and lost till the last penny.
Definitely fact check needed before saying anything about DOGE.
The recent bull market is full of "influential people" who shilled coins so hard so it would pump and DOGE is one of the token that received that kind of treatment in the last bull market. I know it is a shame that people who are new to the market are being controlled by these influential people that makes the shilled token rise. Though the shilling that Elon made make many people gain profit and I believe that majority of old DOGE holders are the one who gained the most profit. DOGE is a meme coin and I don't think it will fail even if Elon didn't shilled it. It will stay at it's current position at least even without Elon help.