I know you cited the source for that 10k crypto number, but I think he is counting some semi-legit coins, because if you were to count every meme coin that was created at Pump.fun I think the numbers would be in the 30k+ range :)

Still the argument of new vs old coin does have some legitimacy. Investors in crypto are attracted towards the new shiny things regardless of the merit of those things. Another point that you bring up in this post is basically about utility. Utility vs Memes is a classic one. Last year when we had a run utility basically took a back seat and it was all about narratives and memes. We had AI narrative, RWA narrative and memes and those were the hottest sectors of crypto.

When I say new coins are better, this means they are better for making money. They also need to be in the right narrative and actually be doing things. How do we know if project is doing things besides the news releases?

One way is to look at the TVL (and you can look it up here: https://defillama.com/chains):
ETH $62 Billion
SOL $8.5 Billion
BTC $6 Billion
BSC $6 Billion
Tron $4.9 Billion
Base $3.7 Billion
...
ADA $321.8m (are we sure there is much going on on Cardano?)
...
VET $1.42m ( I guess VeChain is not about DeFi )

I think the argument for new coins on Big Chains has a lot of merit. For example the largest exchange on Base chain is AERO, you cannot buy Base token, AERO is basically a proxy for the Base token which is a token of Coinbase and AERO is a new token on a well funded chain where a lot of stuff is happening. Defi Lama doesn't even list Hive... That is how under radar we are... A bit concerning if you ask me.

I circled AERO, as you can see it is the top exchange on Base and it has almost a billion dollars TVL on AERO and on just one chain. Number to is Morpho with slightly less but across 18 chains!

A hot narrative that you mentioned is RWA and in that narrative newer coins are ONDO and Render, I don't own any Render which is also in the AI narrative but I do have a small position in ONDO.

While I am putting a lot of effort on Hive and I believe in it long term I am also hedging my bets by placing some small investments in new coins that are in the hot narratives like AI, RWA. My wife who is way more intelligent than me and is great at making long term decisions based on incomplete information (Her whole career was Director, Vice President, General Manager and CEO) is telling me to invest new capital in those new coins in hot narratives in case we do get a bull run in altcoins this cycle... I am a stubborn one and will probably end up doing both...