For sure agreed, shortcuts to avoid thinking are to be very wary of. These people who label / pigeonhole foolishly, I label them "labelers".

Jokes aside, sometimes I find labels (used on myself) sort of brave. E.g. I'm an atheist. I hated thinking about myself like that before (when i was younger than 29ish) because it's a factual statement that I do not have know the truth of. So, it's unscientific, it's a lie. But I am an atheist. A "God" is just too simple an explanation. Nature is way more interesting than that. Who knows? My self-labeling is a way to be honest about what I feel, rather than prioritizing never being incorrect.

Definitely agree that most altcoins are scams and get-rich-quick bullshit. Do you certainly believe that all altcoins are either scams or worse (technologically) than bitcoin?

For instance, PoW. Is that optimal? Trustlessness by way of requiring so much energy in order to cheat that it's mostly unfeasible. Obviously PoS is bullshit. But there are others. What about proof of space? Instead of using computing power as your limited resource, they use storage space. You fill a harddrive with random stuff based on some public hash of the chain, then to mine a block of transactions, you search your harddrive (quick, due to merkle tree partitions) for a row that has, like bitcoin, a digest lower than the current block difficulty. Submit your block plus that row plus the key, baby you got a PoW alternative!

Most interesting is Monero. There's a reason it's loved by developers and mathematicians. It's truly incredible. Are you interested in learning about why it is fascinating? Maximalism will force you to ignore good solutions, in the same way that the church suppressed astrophysics for so many years. And there are people who gain a lot by acting maximalist. People who use fake confidence, fake domain-knowledge, in order to get customers to buy into them as a thought leader. And on this site specifically, in order to get you to buy subscriptions to their blogs.. Once you have a thought leader like that, you are a slave.

If you're interested in knowing a bit about Monero, I can recommend this page. It has the original whitepaper, an extended whitepaper with a ton of criticism and addendums, and a third party review of the whitepaper from a real mathematician (it's aimed at semi-laymen). This review is hilarious, and it is very negative to a LOT of aspects of the original monero whitepaper. How often do you see bitcoiners link to critiques of their own protocol? Your maximalist thought leaders certainly will never. This social manipulation strategy is well known, easy to recognize. Here's what I'm talking about, and below it is the monero research page with the papers.