When a bunch of people who put money in over the last couple years have substantially less money now then they did at the time, it's a stretch to think of it as a savings vehicle. Certainly it is for those people.

I've considered getting super concrete with this, e.g., getting the time periods for which this "savings" concept would and would not make sense. Haven't got around to it, though.

I'd say this is a function of societal memory. Think "years since last x% crash". From this we could do a comparison of accepted savings vehicles and come up with a threshold. Anybody wanna do the math? Might be a good bounty subject.