Altcoins will always remain dead. Majority of them just make false promises and give you all kinds of false expectations to put money in their pockets. Although I must admit ALTCOINS will never actually be dead because they will be used for pump and dumps. If you are lucky and quick enough to jump on a trend then you can make BANK with Altcoins.
Maybe there will be more dead tokens in the future because the rate at which many of the cryptocurrency project are launching, it means that investors would have no option later than to keep moving money from one crypto project tomthe other. This is what we would be experiencing and any project that eventually loses it community due to negative outcome, they would have to keep doing airdrop in order to bring back the users to their platform.
You have good points there and this is more reason why I suspect that many old coins/tokens would not be able to perform as they did in the last bull run, which is against the expectations of many people. It is only an insensitive person who would not know that the crypto market is being flooded with new cryptocurrencies these days, both good and bad, some are even there to steal people's money. And as many as they are now, I think they are in their thousands, they need patronage which is often through people's money.
This is what will boost their market capitalization, but when there are too many of them, that whole money would now spread on them randomly, which will not make many expected cryptos rise as the money that was supposed to be placed on them as though there was not much of them will actually be invested in many depending on the speculation of people on their prefered cryptos. This will not affect altcoins alone but also Bitcoin, people's money will be effectively distributed on all of them. For this, some crypto will not perform as expected while others will perform more than expected. You can prove me wrong with the actual event in the next 1.5 years.