While you can use cryptocurrency to make purchases, most people treat it as a long-term investment. However, investing in cryptocurrency can be risky if you don’t know where to begin.
It's hard or almost impossible to pick one cryptocurrency which will perform the best in the future because as you already said there are thousands of them out there. Coinmarketcap has 10.968 cryptos listed at the moment, as others in this thread already said, you can probably forget about at least 9000 of them. What i can almost definitely say is that all those meme-coins that emerged within the last weeks and months will not have the best future because 99% of them will be dead and gone within the next few months. I think that maybe 2 or 3 meme-coins will survive of those hundreds that were launched.
I would stick to established coins like ETH or BTC if you want to make a relatively safe investment.