I don't feel attracted to any of coins you mentioned tbh. Shiba Inu, already increased a lot, I don't buy coins which are already popular. Elon coin sounds shitcoin. XLM fair choice I guess, this has been in market since long time but I see no hype around it.
So you also don't buy ETH or BTC because they are popular? It is not because a coin has increased a lot, that it can't increase any further (look at Solana). Agreed on Elon coin, that is just another shitcoin that is useless and has no use; XLM is not a bad choice, but it seems there is no real development around that coin anymore and you never really a big pump (or dump) for it also.
Popularity comes in 2 ways , being popular because they are legit projects and have been in the market for long time that people are used to trust this .
and the other one is about those being pumped and popularized by manipulator so yes they are mostly scam project or going to fool people ..