The reason why there is so much interest in popular cryptocurrencies is because they have been tested and trusted and you know they won't rug you, most of these new tokens you don't know them, especially their developers because most of them are anonymous, so the risk of them scamming you is huge, but a project that has delivered part of its roadmap, you know the technical capacity of the team and if they will deliver or not
even the governments today are interested in BTC but along with it is also the USDT. these two belong together if you are up to accumulating BTC. and the maxis are also going only for BTC. but if you compare it to the altcoins where you can own billions of them, you can make more money out of those memecoins than just sticking to only BTC.
it's risky but it's worth it if you invested the first. SHIB for example if you have invested in it from its lowest price in mid-2023, you could have multiplied 2x already. i think it was less risky since Shib is popular too. the ones not popular such as above 100 of CMC, you may not want to get involved with.