You are right...the cryptocurrency market is always on an open season where anybody can introduce anything to anyone but sadly only a very few will eventually make it to the top and stay there for years. Heck, even projects that got some taste of success in their initial years got no guarantee that they will continue to be doing good. In this industry, it is as if there is a funnel that will vet all projects and at the end of the day only select few will actually be alive at the end of the tunnel. There are many factors for such a success...but the ultimate one is the reaction of the market in general because in the past there had been not so good ones but became successful and there are many good ones in terms of utility cases but eventually got killed.
There are many reasons for a token to succeed: team, capital, solutions, community, utility, ecosystem, trend... but I think the fundamental cause is whale manipulation. If a token is worthy of being chosen by whales to pump, its price will increase, and conversely, when a token is abandoned, it will soon disappear from media and investor minds.
Technology, community, team... are just one of the bases for whales to choose to allocate their capital to create maximum profit while spending minimum cost. Analyzing whale actions through on-chain used to be very popular because they believed they could know all whale behaviors and intentions ^^
Unfortunately, we cannot easily regain control of the game from the hands of whales, they are stronger than us, they have a lot of data on the trading behavior of all of us. We can only rely on fundamental analysis and technical analysis to choose tokens and predict the market. Capital and risk management skills are the key to our success, even if sometimes investing in a few failed ALTs.