Pretty much dependsnon what you definition of what a Shitcoin and what a legitimate alternative coin is, to be honest. It is relative.
For some people Dogecoin is a Shitcoin which does not have any actual value, because of its inflational model of mining, while other will defend it as the best memecoin in the market and because of it, it is on the top ten of all coins according to their market capitalization.
Alternative currencies themselves are not a suicidal choice when comes to investing, one only needs to filter in a effective way which coins are actually garbage and which ones have something different and unique to offer to the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Monero, for example,.it has privacy features which Bitcoin does not have so it would be difficult to tag such coin as a Shitcoin, it is an actual alt coin with actual value to offer and a real use case.
If someone has money to spare and chooses to gamble that money with shitcoins, to each their own, this is a community which values freedom after all.