Lots of countries came under severe pressure in that crisis, and I can't even find evidence that HK was among those worst-affected. I'm saying I'd need to see a lot more than pointing out that late 1997 was a shit year for them, to determine if that was the fault of their currency-pegging. If you are only going to provide a single data point, that's like pointing at the US during the '08 crisis and going "well I guess fiat currency doesn't work!" You're gonna need to connect a lot more dots to make that argument, with that example, because that was just a bad year all around.

Actually, the maybe-relevant part of this is that Thailand kicked it off by screwing up currency-pegging and having to switch to float, which led to a panic. But Hong Kong didn't suffer particularly hard from it, overall, compared to those worst-affected, so using HK in late 1997 as the example of this practice failing still isn't very strong.

(I can't find any mention of the Mexico thing on the Wiki article, but have a weirdly-strong memory of that specific detail being mentioned in an IPE class years and years ago, so either I'm wrong or it's one of those things that's considered a kind of folk-knowledge poli-sci and economics but doesn't make it to places like Wikipedia, some action that "wasn't" directly connected, but [by common understanding of folks in those fields] totally was—further digging reveals an Argentine event in 1998 that did affect Mexico, so I'm guessing that's what I'm recalling and that at the very least that particular professor considered it obviously true that the two events were connected, so presented that as a continuation of the Asian Crisis in late '97)

[EDIT] To be clear I'm not even going hard into the paint for pegging currencies, I just think that's a bad example and that lots of readers may not recall or be aware of the late 90s crises to have context for it, especially fellow US readers.

This is generally true, but I think you might be out of date. About 15 years ago, the US government passed a law that specifically prohibited the melting of pennies and nickels for the purpose of selling the materials for profit:

§ 82.1 Prohibitions. Except as specifically authorized by the Secretary of the Treasury (or designee) or as otherwise provided in this part, no person shall export, melt, or treat: (a) Any 5-cent coin of the United States; or (b) Any one-cent coin of the United States.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/31/82.1.

Click "next" on that link for the special exceptions, which do allow for modifying small amounts of these for jewelry or decoration.