I disagree with this affirmation.

Bitcoin price above all in the first years was almost exclusively driven by retailers. The institutional investors are a relatively new phenomenon, starting with people like Saylor's MicroStrategy in the mid to late 2010s, which was still a quite isolated investment, and then taking off in the 2020s with Tesla, El Salvador etc.. And of course the ETFs, which exist since 2021 in some countries but exploded with 2024's US approval, drove a completely new public into the Bitcoin market.

I think some confuse "retailers" with "new users", which are those who google "buy bitcoin", and are interested more in memecoins than in Bitcoin according to popular belief   But a significant part of the population, in many countries around 5-10%, already has used or held Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency. They will not google "buy bitcoin" anymore, so they may be more difficult to "track". But they are very significant when it comes to their influence on the Bitcoin price. I guess 99% of the Bitcointalk users are "retailers".

Even whales are sometimes retailers, often early adopters, although they are becoming more rare over time.