Sounds like a great book!
I also got lucky with DOGE, buying a bit of it when it was just fractions of a penny and selling when it was around 70 cents. But that's been pretty much my only big success with alts.
Yeah the people who chase big gains on alts, most of whom lose, is the reason why I think the alt season is done. Mostly we hear about pump and dumps like the Hawk Tua lady but mostly I think people get involved in this stuff hoping that they can cash out fast enough to avoid the rug pull. In these situations where the coin doesn't actually do anything other than exist as a coin, then I think those that do lose deserve to. Other alts grow though, like TRX for example. I regularly purchase TRX for the use of transactions because it is so much faster than something like ETH and especially BTC. I don't know why this is, I just know that it is and therefore it has a real purpose. I lost quite a lot of money on SHIB because I did "research" and was convinced it was going to moon. Well here we are 3 years later and it is stagnant AF and likely is always going to stay that way. I don't really seen any good reason why it would change. Mostly I completely ignore any alt hype because there are far more opportunities to lose than there is to win.