Actually, this industry routinely runs what you'd call "hero marketing," and what makes it especially dangerous for young people is that they're being sold success stories by actors playing people who don't exist, fictional characters who supposedly got rich through crypto.
1.A tiny handful of success stories are pushed to the front.
2.The vast majority who lost money are made invisible.
3.It manufactures the expectation that this time, you could be the one.
4.The price movement itself becomes the reward stimulus.
5.The platform, the exchange, the issuer, and the early investors all hold an advantage in fees or liquidity.
The problem is that this is identical to gambling. But it's dressed up as "finance." The industry obscures the fact that crypto functions as gambling by making people think of it as a new kind of financial asset.
Of course, crypto is technology. It's true that there are technological components, blockchains, smart contracts, and the like. But just because something contains technology doesn't mean the mass marketing around it qualifies as technology investment. Anti-counterfeiting technology is also technology. That doesn't make putting money into circulating counterfeit bills an "investment in currency security technology." By the same logic, the fact that crypto contains technological elements is being used to justify the marketing structure built on top of it, and that, precisely, is the deception.
And for all the talk of decentralization, the reality that USDT and similar tokens end up tethered to a single dominant exchange, heavily coupled to nation states, essentially proves that true decentralization is impossible in practice. This is only natural. Decentralization makes trading inconvenient, so people gravitate toward a single centralized exchange. And at that point, what exactly is the difference between that exchange and a government?
Yes, and: it's not completely exclusive to crypto. The UK FCA had to ban "binary options", a financial instrument using traditional money, due to the high volume of scams. https://www.fca.org.uk/consumers/binary-options-scams
While true about that 'hero' marketing, you can claim the same about literally any marketing campaign, or things like American Dream (TM).
How many teenagers looked with starry eyes into US military recruiting PR campaigns, then get send to Iraq / Afghanistan, and instead of glory and cool adventures that were promised they saw death of peers and civilians on massive scale, they became invaders for at best questionable causes, experienced huge human suffering and destruction... which at the end didn't achieve anything positive at all, neither for US nor for locals, massively in contrary. Heroes look very differently in hindsight.
It's gambling, and it's gambling in dodgy unregulated casinos.
"This guy won big!" is absolutely a part of the marketing that pulls in the other suckers. It's not a counter-example, it's part of the scheme.
I know people who really enjoy a night out losing a 3-digit sum of money in a casino. Somehow they get sufficient reward from that to make the expense worthwhile for them.
The difference is, that unlike the Crypto enthusiasts, they don't afterwards try to convince me at length that gambling can and should replace money transfers, foreign exchange, banks in general, pension funds, the governmental exchequer etc. That would be cultish lunacy.