Fair point. I was going through the CMC top coins in top 100, and nearly all of the coins are either defunct or faded into extreme obscurity. Mostly Litecoin & DigiByte & Doge and maybe Peercoin and Feathercoin to an extent.

Given the nature of Tether, would it not be FUDded out of existence? Back in 2014 I would expect users to never use Tether since cryptocurrency as a whole was very niche and Bitcoiners were usually developers, no?

It is distinct from most of the other altcoin projects that got started in the 2012-2014 era. Perhaps that is what made them so successful. Most of the other early altcoins are gone now (Litecoin is an strong exception).

Scoresby

Why is Tether (USDT) even called cryptocurrency? Doesn't look like it has any of the qualities you would expect a cryptocurrency to have, other than a blockchain, which they frequently reroll or mute. With information here, they are even more "unreputable"