Why did it get so big? I thought it launched only one year ago, everyone laughed it off as some cash grab trying to take advantage of doge hype
Not everyone pays that close of attention. There was a lot of confusion about Musk's doge tweets which Shiba used as marketing. Shiba also boosted their market cap by minting all their tokens at once and giving half to Buterin's cold wallet, this making it jump on the leader board with a smaller amount of initial investment. Then they claim deflationary status by having community burns in the millions (which is extremely low volume relative to the volume in existence). Plus being a eth l2, defi works out of the box so people looking to do something with their compatible existing tokens/wEth we're able to 'diversify' into it.