It looks a lot, and it surely is, but it's pretty annoying that people always look at how much in total market cap we have lost, while no one is talking about how much we have gained this year. It was last year that Bitcoin had just a $6 billion market cap, did everyone suddenly forget about that? People at that time were going nuts on Ethereum because at that time its market cap reached a value of $1 billion, and then $2 billion. We made a mega jump forward, but somehow it's not that important anymore for people.
Also, Ripple and various other coins, they didn't really reach an all time high. It's lacking information in the way that they explain that the all time high's of these coins are based on USD, and not Bitcoin. If we look at their Bitcoin value, they have a long way to go before they break through their previous all time high.
I think it's a part of human nature to easily take things for granted. Only when we lose something we realize what we had. This analogy can easily be applied in this scenario. The growth of the marketcap over the past year has kind of gone under the radar yet the last couple of days, when it came down 150 billion, suddenly everybody is talking about it. This only demonstrates how ignorant we as a species can be at times.
I completely agree with you on your point about some coins solely hitting USD ATH's. A lot of people get deceived by this. You correctly point out that ripple may be worth 1$ now but if it maintained itns bitcoin all time high of 14,000 satoshis it would be valued at roighky 2.5$ today.