That's quite a different story and difficult to compare to Hive. I believe some big players noticed how Luna worked and what capital was required not just to make it implode but to also short it before the implosion to make the most out of it crashing, along with the rest of the market heading towards a downturn, institutions being over-leveraged, etc, etc. Hive or more importantly HBD is capped, that cap was increased recently based on how it's priced to Hive's marketcap but even so if the price drops low enough it stops printing. Luna didn't have this feature and kept printing constantly which caused the supply to increase by thousand if not tens of thousand fold resulting in the massive price crash.
On top of it all Hive doesn't have any future's contracts, as far as I know Binance has a 3x margin option for it which isn't a big deal for anyone trying to manipulate price down with a lot of capital. For what it's worth Hive also is "connected" in a way to the rest of the markets, so if Hive is showing to be an outlier to the rest of the market, and others realize that there's really nothing wrong/no change to its security or how things are running, they're going to be buying it as it looks like a good deal that will eventually correct back making it harder and harder for anyone attempting to manipulate price down, not even considering people here who may have money laying around wanting to get back in at a certain price. I just think your theory is a bit impossible/improbable and anyone trying to either sell hive this low and on top of it manipulate it downwards more in an effort to "destroy it's reputation" or morale, it's going to cost them a lot while at the same time risking a lot (short squeezes).
If big selloff's happen at the top or when markets are looking more bullish, the volume's there are a lot higher too, people have more profits to trade with and trade they will, there's been no lack of trading volume for Hive and similar altcoins on exchanges over the years and they've only kept growing, you can see this in hive's marketcap by comparing the daily trading volume's at the top or leading up to it compared to today. It's all quite speculative and a bit unreasonable fear in my opinion. JS barely even seems to be aware of Steem let alone holding a grudge and more importantly holding Hive still to attempt to sell it off to get back at it.
I guess it is more of an unfounded fear that I have based on the trauma of living in Venezuela and seeing whole "working economies" die off for "socialism" So i might be just paranoid and untrusting in all economies just because of that, still I loved the answers and how you addressed those fears, I think they are now unfounded and non-possible at all, thanks for clearing my head on those things :)