Small cap manipulation - is this what determines which projects go 100x?

Since getting into crypto I have been solely focused on figured out which projects go 20-100x in a bull run, as far as I'm concerned that's the only way I'm making life changing money in this market without near full time trading. I'm talking 5-50m mcap coins that hit the CMC top 100 - it happens every cycle and there must be some way of increasing your odds of picking such a winner.

I remember meet a guy who was very early on Doge, came to know a lot of the early team personally, but bought the dream and held his bag too long and lost almost all of his immense immense gains. I have done similar myself. He spent months post-morteming his mistakes and came to this conclusion:

More important than anything in figured out which projects will go 100x is not utility or partnerships etc. but identifying the behaviour of it's insiders and market makers. Any new project with any kind of pedigree and seed funding has market makers who pretty much will decide where that project goes. Some they seem to be short term P&Ds, some they consider to be range bound suppliers for their liquidity mining bots, and then a select few they accumulate for future pumps.

There seems to be a few things in common with a lot of the top 100 and that is that they went through long periods of flatlining price action, sometimes for years, after an initial P&D. Rather than just being a product of bear markets, this guy claimed that by looking on chain, usually requiring services that cost thousands of even tens of thousands per year that near enough no retail investors bother to use, instead focusing on TA which is nearly irrelevant for such small projects, you can see that a handful of market makers are usually keeping the price of these chosen project range bound or even dumping them whilst siphoning off supply and accumulating over years.

These big boys will NOT buy 10% of the supply over a month when they hear some exciting news, that's retail behaviour, they spend years and time this activity around the market cycle.

I used some of his principles to pick a few projects at the end of the last bull run. I picked very well but failed to take profits during their initial P&Ds, and since then have been watching them remain range bound during the bear, never dropping to zero and always maintaining pretty good volume, but never being allowed to pump, not even with the market.

Long story short I am starting to doubt my entire philosophy now that the bull is coming. Maybe this is all delusional and just convinces you to bag hold and ignore the hot new projects that will actually explode in a bull market? Then again maybe that's what we are supposed to do.. give up hope, hand over our bags to market makers at a discounts nd watch as they finally allow them to pump into favourable market conditions when he time comes?

Any thoughts?