They/we were saying that many of the businesses that were being heavily invested in were unsound because they lacked a real plan towards profitability. Many businesses had no chance of turning profit, but were VC funded like crazy. I worked at a company that was doing "group buy" purchases and the product themselves weren't really getting real group discounts, so they just burned investment money to discount them. Literally buying customers under the thought that getting scale would just eventually solve the problem. And then the whole house of cards fell apart.
It wasn't until a few years later, when Google figured it out with AdWords, etc. that people started making real money.
There's no inherent reason to assume that this will happen with cryptocurrency.
Also, the NYT is often garbage.
https://fair.org/take-action/action-alerts/new-york-times-re...
In contrast to bitcoin/etc, it was always clear how broadly useful the internet would be.
Even while companies with inflated valuations like eBay were being battered, a broad amount of the mainstream population was using the sites every day and loving them.
It does not feel the same with cryptocoins, where owning an NFT Ape remains some peculiar niche thing and typical people have no relationship with cryptocoins at all.
Crypto coins and NFTs are like the latter.