I think that shitcoins now = memecoins. I suppose it's not a bad thing, as now memecoins have separated good projects with real products from what should be considered as just an idea/meme. Anything without a product should be considered a memecoin. People are getting smarter and I hope that eventually they will be able to distinguish a project with a real product/technology from a meme/idea easily.
That is true, as soon as I see a memecoin, I automatically assume it's a shitcoin and that is what I believe most people also believe in as well. When you see a shitcoin, you know it's a shitcoin, you do not even have to assume anything, you just know it and you can make that deduction easily.
What we should assume right now is to make sure that we can find proper coins, and when you want to invest into a proper coin, then it could be done in any trend. There are thousands of bad ICO's, but did any project do alright with an ICO start? Sure it did, or IEO, or STO, many did. So you need to realize, it is not about "how", but it is about which one. If you pick the right one, you are going to make a lot of money with it without a doubt.
I agree with the first part of your post. About the second part, what's important is how external funding (ICO, IEO, STO etc) is effecting tokenomics. Generally, the raise is rigged towards allocating as much as possible to the team, unlocked token arrangements, and other form of allocations that ruin even good projects. If anyone is to learn anything from this discussion, its to learn how to assess tokenomics. If you can do that, you'll probably avoid 99%+ of anything that is raising money before it even has a product.