Yeah, no matter how big the company is, no matter how promising the project seems, it is still a new project and has to compete with hundreds of thousands of other crypto projects in this harsh market to survive. I would not dare to put my faith in a project like that if it is not well-promoted, does not have a transparent team, and does not have a large investment fund backing it. We have many new and successful projects to choose from in this cycle, there is no reason to risk our capital on a project that has not yet gained a foothold in the market.
Investing in top coins is always a safer, more time-saving and easier option. The profits from a completely new project can be very large if it is successful, but the risks are extremely high, to the point where investors could lose all their capital. I do not encourage new investors to participate in such investments.
Nowadays, having a large investment coming from big companies is a factor already on whether that new project will be a successful one or not... or at least the token of the project will have a value. We've seen new projects that are being backed by Binance, and in exchange, they might be getting a portion of a total supply of the token. What's good in this one as well is that they will be listed on the most popular exchange as well through Launchpads at first.
I've seen projects being backed by popular investors, projects being that promising enough, projects that can be attractive to investors for some reasons, projects that have detailed whitepapers, and they are ending up as a scam project. I don't know if it's only me, but I don't invest into new projects anymore because like you said, it still needs to compete with other projects with the same category as that project, and they still need to prove that they're different from the ones that are existing already.
Also, you said that investing in top coins is safer than investing in new projects and that's true that's why that is what I'm doing currently. Investing into top coins saves more time doing research compared to researching those new projects. It also reduces the risk since they already have a huge market cap. Although it doesn't change the fact that even though they are at the top, there's a chance that they will rug pull their investors, at least investing into the top coins lessens the risk.