The difference is in terms of stability. Most popular capitalized projects already have a solid foundation and backing by many players in the crypto industry. Some even have other projects built using their blockchain. It's not difficult to see why most investors would rather put their money in popular crypto coins than the newer altcoins. During the bear market when the prices of these capitalized coins go down, the investors are always confident that when the bull run comes back, the price will go back up and possibly attain a new all time high. Same cannot be said for new coins as the risks are many and most of them do not get back up when the prices are up after a bear market.
new coin is always high risk high return, popular coin is always honestly good for investment because if it dumps we almost always know the fact that it will just recover back and thats it.
moreover the trading volume good for people with big money to make some move, so its not very obvious that it disturb the market. moreover they also have volatility thats more or less the same as the newer coin anyway aside from if compared with new coin initial listing which gonna have so high volatility it might go up ten thousand percent or go down ten thousand percent.
so I guess thats why popular coin seem like having so much interest because there are many people with big money are interested in taking advantage of the volatility of these coin.
even with the fact that institutional investors are trying hard to invest some of their assets diversifying into some of the cryptocurrency popular coin its no wonder that these coin are so sought after.
not to mention with the presence of popular way of staking coin for long term like for example is ethereum.