You don't have to buy the expensive coins price if you don't have much money and I think you should buy a cheap price coin because you will have the opportunity to see the price increase later.
Iota, XEM, NEO, TRON, Vechain is a good coin, and I am sure that you can make a list of the cheap coins and you need to know how much you should buy with your balance.
Not all altcoin will return to zero in 2109, there still many good altcoins that have potential to increase higher because we have many times to wait for the coming of the bull market.
So the first thing you should do is decide how much money you will use to buy each coin and make sure that you don't buy more than 10 coins because it will be too difficult to manage. It is fine if you only buy 3-5 coins at the same time and you now have a good time to buy those coins before the price start to increase.
I agree with you that there are lots of altcoins out there that can be invested in, though they look down now but it’s a good time to invest in them since they have reached their lowest value. I think the writer thinks that all the altcoin he is seeing are expensive because he is just entering the market or a newbie, so this is actually the best time to buy now.
For example, I bought docademics (MTC) last year June for around 0.4 usd and now it’s down to 0.006841, I don’t think this type of altcoins is expensive now since it still has potential of rising back and one of the many good coins out there like you rightly said.