Happy that you shared this piece but aren't the crypto exchanges who list these coins complicit in the act or are they going to feign ignorance that they don't know what's happening? I believe that even though there are the other actors pushing it, it will not be completely and successfully executed without the go ahead of the exchange. In my estimation, they look the other way just so that everyone who's in on it can get something out of it.
They are, in a many number of ways. From what I can gather, they do not care at all about any serious listing criteria anymore. The most important thing is that you pay the listing fees, which you can do through any number of people selling these services on telegram.

Yes you are right, they can easily get this money from the money made from their telegram activities, but take note that not all exchange encourages all this scam coin, because most of this exchange are equally deceived like everyone, but their are some project that looks nice from the first day till it will be launched, after them, manipulation will gradually set's in, and the largest holders of the coin will just sell off, which will collapse the value of the coin .
That's why am seriously against holding alt and meme because all of them can be easily manipulated irrespective of the market cap.
One newer form of manipulation that I have seen, but involves altcoins, is the buyout of an old established project and then rug it with sudden and horrible changes. This can be done overtly by visible ownership changes, but also hidden one. Essentially, they are buying up the reputation in order to defraud a large amount than they paid for. Just a big money variant of the pump and dump scam of small coins.
This is my exact sentiment on alt and meme, because they may look very nice for months or years, but along the line, something might happen, either changes as you illustrated or some other things happen, before you will know it, the largest holder of the coin will just sell off all his holdings, and that single step will crash the value of the coin to almost nothing, which will result in a significant losses, so my candide advice here is we should avoid holding alt or meme coin especially because they are where manipulation strives.