Crypto bulls and bears oscillate between 1/2, as the market turns hot/cold. Gizmodo is very clearly selling confirmation to the anti-crypto crowd currently looking for narratives to support their use of statement 1).
Anyone who is hyper-confident in either direction is usually wrong.
Judgement about a particular subject should at the least rely on some detail about that subject. This is just an generalized appeal to the law of averages.
TL;DR - Armchair experts on either side of the argument make poor investors.
The lack of barriers to creating, marketing, and hype-selling a new project inherently makes 99% of the projects in this space "vaporware". The terms "grift, rugpull, scam" etc. are appropriate.
Unsophisticated retail "investors" (and hell, even sophisticated speculators just subscribing to 'greater fool' investing - e.g., most VCs) are focused heavily on the upside in these types of projects, because the measure of success is "money made". There are people who respond to this by writing off the space entirely - "It's a ponzi scheme", "scam city", "tulips", etc. All fun memes to tout the "I told you so narrative"
My personal belief is that there is the potential for "ethical alpha" (subjective, perhaps - primarily meant to differentiate from 'get out before it implodes' alpha) to be had by investing long-term in the remaining projects with the combination of development attention, enterprise buy-in, and scaling capabilities that could deliver meaningful value to end-users. I'm not going to get into a debate over which projects meet these criteria, whether they exist, or any other debate which likely will revolve endlessly with no resolution.
I acknowledge there are risks associated with the broader technology being adopted in a meaningful sense, but subscribe to a perspective that there is yet-unrealized value in its application.
I create value in the real world and use the euro to exchange it against something else of value, which is very convenient, but the euro itself is not the goal.
Call it unregulated crypto gambling or something, that would be more honest.