I feel like your analysis is spot on. I feel quite strongly that the market is open to this manipulation due to incredibly low levels of actual adoption. When people and companies hold tokens to power mission-critical applications, there will be much less price volatility. The vast majority of people holding crypto see it as a speculative instrument, and have never even used a distributed application. We need crypto to have intrinsic value due to real world use cases. Until that happens, we all get whiplash.