Most of the time there are those people who have been saying that it is too late to buy bitcoin for many years now. Too late at 1k, too late at 10k and so on and so forth.
It will always be "too late" because the current price where we talk about bitcoin is the highest price at the moment. You do not know how high bitcoin can go and our reference is always the previous or current all time high amount. That is the ceiling for us. Bitcoin will always increase over time. No use of doubting yourself every time you want to buy bitcoin.
Kindly put, this is a very bad rationale. No, the reference is not the ATH, that's dumb. In that sense, bitcoin has no reference point as in stock markets you could use industries and multiples or other KPIs. You could use DCF models and what not. The reference points in bitcoin rather relate to global circumstances and unique features that other things don't have. If the reference point was the ATH, then please consider that it once started at 1 cent or less. Now calculate how many ATHs buyers went through and still were positive its potential all the way up to more than $100,000. That's 10 million reference points according to your theory and yet people buy it. There must be something else.
But I agree that there are people who use ATH as the reference point and they are those who thought about buying at 20k, then didn't saw it go down to 3k and then didn't because 20k was their reference point. Hm, I think they missed an opportunity, don't you agree? But when bitcoin was back to 20k, they thought ok 21k is an ATH, I rather don't buy. There is a problem with that logic.