They just needed something to build so it would stand on something else other then pure hype.
Helping numerous people to earn thousands of dollars isn't in any way impressive, it's just basic math when people hype something, others who got in early on profit from it. It doesn't mean project has to be good. Bitconnect made early people rich i (if they left before it crashed). Would you say that was an impressive ecosystem as well?
I once saw a guy who bragged about having a million of it, and I was really happy for him, then went back and saw that it's like 20 bucks to have a million of it, and the explanation dude had was "it's 20 bucks now, but imagine how rich I will be when shiba is 1 dollars!", dude literally thought there was any type of feasible way that shiba would be 1 dollars one day, in the future. They did not even checked what that would mean for the market cap, they just assumed 1 dollar is small number so it must be possible.