A fair number of people got out pretty far ahead. Occasionally you'll run across a local business in Silicon Valley that makes no economic sense (eg. a nightclub, or a meadery, or a rug merchant, or a restaurant that never seems to have customers) and then you find out the owner was an early Netscape employee or rented space to Paypal in exchange for equity.

The bill was largely footed by large numbers of people who knew nothing about the technology. I know one person who founded a router company in 1996, IPO'd in 2000, cashed out his shares for ~8 figures right before the market cratered, and is using that to fund his second startup. I know another person who invested in all sorts of dot-coms in 2000 and lost her entire inheritance & life savings in that (and a few real-estate purchases in 2007). I'd bet that the second group outnumbers the first by a large margin, but people in the first do exist.

Certainly some people got out of the dot-com era and did very well even if you exclude the Mark Cubans and Elon Musks of the world. I'm sometimes annoyed at myself that I didn't get into some stocks I actually knew a lot about early on although I didn't have a lot of money to invest at the time.

I was more talking about day traders specifically. I suspect most of them burned up their capital at some point or other. And a lot of this is probably related to the maxim that when taxi drivers start offering you investment advice, it's likely time to get out.