You are right trend is based on speculation. Being hype is a good feature of a memecoin. Dont know if meme has useful utility anyway they dont work like that and comparing to L1 or bitcoin.
The most famous memcoins do have utilitarian features. For example, DOGE has always had a utilitarian feature in the form of convenient value arbitrage between exchanges because DOGE commissions were very minimal. I recently saw news that FLOKI has been added as a payment method on the famous AliExpress website. SHIB also has the properties of a payment method on some well-known services of goods and services. It doesn't prove that memcoins are useful, it's rather an exception to the rule, most of memcoins however are absolutely useless.