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 ..
Correct. but sometimes projects that are manipulated are sometimes more interesting. because based on data and marketing systems, they will exaggerate what they have with the aim of attracting and deceiving as many users as possible.