"Legitimate" projects are in between a rock and a hard place - either pay outrageous sums to the shillers or have no avenue to promote your project, as Google/Twitter/Facebook won't touch your crypto ads. Instead of the decentralised utopia we were promised, we've shifted power from traditional marketing channels with a vested interest in providing some ROI to scammers with no accountability, only in it to make a dollar at whatever cost. Scammers and hustlers are the gatekeepers of new tokens - unless you're paying thousands of dollars [2], it's almost impossible to get recognised.
Most projects are scams/get-rich-quick schemes preying on people's ignorance. There are well intentioned tokens out there, but even these have very dubious links between the price of the token and the utility of the project. The buybacks, reflections, stable-coin rewards, promises of guaranteed returns b/c we reinvest into other projects quickly part the ignorant from their hard-earned. Any attempt to dig deeper and understand project economics are met with the same platitudes and flawed arguments.
Of course there's the other side of the ecosystem where smart and talented people are raising VC money and working on interesting problems. I do believe there's something there around business model innovations (e.g. near fee-less micro-transactions tied to a crypto identity as a low impedance alternative to SSO) or technological innovations (blockchain-based serverless compute powering dApps - I do see a whole host of problems to which smart contract based dApps are a viable solution). The end result of this isn't a financial revolution but rather a host of entrepreneurs utilising web3 technologies to build the next generation of software startups.
[1] - https://agentsinu.com
[2] - 5k-10k USD for a single Telegram post is not uncommon