It becomes an encouragement when you don't have much capital and all you wanna do is to trade and grow your money from there. But it's also needed to be understood that those long-term holders probably have taken their own share of experience of trying to hard and get some profit on the market. And the majority of them, well, include me so we didn't have good results at all when we tried. With that, it became a reason to just hold and be firm of being a long term investor because it's also a proven strategy that works for many.
I agree that holding is indeed one of the most profitable strategies, and I also send part of the deposit to a long-term hold. However, this strategy really works only with a fairly large capital, and such one that you can afford to invest and "forget" about for several years. This means that you cannot use this money even in critical situations, and for this you need to have additional savings for such cases.
It is true that holding is best when you've got a larger amount and you should have decided that it wouldn't be touched for a long time and as much as possible, you'll have to add more to see the greater impact of it when the bull run comes. Although there really is no rule if you're a long-term holder and there's all of a sudden that you need to sell what you're holding, we're all free to sell anytime unless you put that into some staking or inflexible savings. Yes, there are people who do this, and the worst part is it's on centralized exchanges.
Not everyone can do this. That is why those people are engaged in trading, which allows them to get, albeit smaller, but faster profits. In addition, these funds can always be withdrawn, if they are badly needed, without destroying the entire strategy.
One thing that I am worried about that is many are losing instead of winning there. However that I cannot judge someone's winners and losers but if we're going to reiterate, then it's good that there have been those consistent winners.