I keep running into people who think that everything that went on and continues to go on with BTC was justified because of the market cap

it's really weird seeing it. reminds me of how the Chinese government tries to justify things like the Tiananmen Square massacre or the concentration camps by pointing at China's economic development. these people were paid to not care about things like being able to own your own money and not being forced onto a custodian. they were paid to not care about the astroturfed narrative shift from disruptive and empowering MoE to boring and useless SoV. maybe they see the price ticker going up all the time and it makes it hard to think about these things. like that's it, that's all bitcoin was ever meant to be, you just buy it and do nothing and that's somehow good enough. as long as the price keeps going up it keeps these people happy and they're being paid to not do anything that would actually shake things up or threaten the status quo. all they ever had to do was inject a couple of saboteurs into the dev teams and then pump the living daylights out of it and presto, problem solved.