My question now is, since this bull run has been tagged with major speculations, how can a potential investor navigate his or her way through a long-term, meaningful and financially impactful projects as against those riding on just the hypes?
Avoid those shit coin projects, they just dies always ( sooner or later).
BTC is what created the whole thing and every price movement you see on the crypto market is dependent on the Bitcoin's trend and rarely we see a coin or token pumped only because of someone popular voucher/mentioned or created it and people started going crazy without knowing the actual intention of those projects.
Just buy BTC and forget about the manipulation, speculation.