That’s probably a simplistic view? An ICO obviously introduces trust in a third party (the company issuing the ICO). Does that mean all ICOs defeat the purposes of crypto? To the degree that your view of crypto is that it is all about decentralized, quasi anonymous money transfer yes. To the degree that you consider the other benefits of crypto assets, no. To add weight to the latter view point, I’d argue that Ethereum was the first ICO. Is the whole “purpose” of crypto negated with Ethereum? That’s a hard position to defend imho.

There are probably a lot of in-between cases where a cryptocurrency can be used convert trust in a well respected 3rd party to trust in someone unknown.

For example to have an "account" at a national reserve bank, you basically need to be a bank. A reserve bank could promise to honour certain cryptocurrency transactions between registered banks. But the blockchain as a whole could serve include both reserve-compatible-account-ids and arbitrary users.

Whether that would be good for anything is another matter. In particular you need a well respected 3rd party who actually wants to back a cryptocurrency. That's not a big set intersection, and Venezuela is not in a position to make it larger.