I'd never recommend investing into PEPE and similar coins for the long term because of their infinitely expanding supply. Everything is decentralized and open source these days, so I don't see why "meme" coins shouldn't exist in the first place. Who knows if this will make the industry stronger in the long run? Just my thoughts
And even before that this space was full of colorful people and partying, i mean if you read the book bitcoin billionaires, Winklevoss brothers were campaigning for bitcoin so that it could be taken seriously, And that might not been easy as early adopters were living luxury life of partying hard and doing drugs. Similar what people did during dot-com bubble.
And this whole space attracted vert much different people than suits. And all the insane material you can find from twitter screenshot archives that biggest adopters have written not too long ago don't paint a picture of mature people. It has been more like "wolf of wallstreet" then people realize. Including people going to jail.