Nowadays it gets attention due to the board members suing each other over some tokens that they basically made all thanks to investors yet claims its theirs.
LoL IOTA was always a vaporware. There were massive I mean MASSIVE amount of IOTA shills everywhere (zerohedge, reddit, btt etc) during the 2017 pump and none of them are around anymore. (We have nano fucks instead)
The people that was hyping that shitcoin you were seeing were getting paid to spread that bullshit. It was being manufactured. They literally dumped on the clueless noobs from the ATH prices. That's why most alts performed a lot worse than BTC during the bear market.