Well, more people realized that. But definitely not all of them. There are still a lot of people who want to enter the crypto world to become rich quickly, fail to do that, and abandon it forever or for a long time.
Yeah surely there are still a lot of weak hands who only want to get rich quick through buying BTC, you cannot get rid of such people in a free market like the BTC network. But if the weaker hands are fewer in number than people who actually believe in BTC and will hold it for a very long time, then volatility would surely be reduced and we'll get a certain level of stability in the price of BTC.
I've been thinking the same thing since we didn't go over $69K in this cycle, and I don't believe any of the predictions that give outlandish results for the next cycle.
You may be right, even though i do not have a strong opinion on this yet. I think many of these predictions are 'hanging' on the approval of BTC spot etf's in the U.S., so many believe that if there is an approval, the price would skyrocket. I don't know what is going to happen, neither am i so interested in BTC spot etf's because i believe in not your keys, not your coins, but very soon i think the sec would budge and approve at least one BTC spot etf application, it could very well be that of Blackrock, then we'll see what it does to the price.