...... there are those who bought bitcoin at 40k - 60k and still hold it and perhaps continue to buy and average the purchase price, this is also not so simple and only those who really believe in Bitcoin will do it. I think such investors have a very good chance of surviving the bear market and making a profit in the new bull market.
None of us can exactly choose the time in which we learn about Bitcoin or that we figure it out, and some people thought that Bitcoin would never go below $50k again.. which was not even a non-zero possibility.
So if we got into Bitcoin in 2021, when prices were largely between $40k and $60k, one of the easiest things would have been to attempt to pace your accumulation of BTC.. and sure, it is possible that any of us might have had tried to front-load our investment (to the extent that we might have had disposable capital that we would have had been able to invest at that time), and even if we were to have had made some larger front-loading investments, it would have had still been prudent to keep a DCA and buying on dip plan.. which is almost the easiest of paths rather than fucking around with thoughts of selling and buying lower... or just HODLing without doing anything for 2-3 years or however long it might take to get back to profitability for those earlier purchased coins.
What you said @JayJuanGee here is right because so many investors who never understood Bitcoin movement and market characteristics in terms of volatility and unpredictability of bitcoin price have come into Bitcoin when the price was at All time high and at that have to wait for a long time for the price of Bitcoin to recover back to the purchase price and also wait longer to see profits so to time the long term bitcoin holding slogans may seem to them as an unending journey.
Bitcoin vs DCA approach seems to be the best safe ride strategy but for that to be highly beneficial one need to have a long run-off knowledge of Bitcoin and in-depth experience of how the market reacts to various characteristic that influences the price at some point and that is not what a newbie investor can do.