You can go to any crypto-trading forum (i.e. /r/bitcoinmarkets) circa 2012 and find that this was common knowledge. Everyone knew/knows that 'Chinese' volume was mostly fake because the exchanges made it easy to do so with low fees. Whether the exchange simply let this happen or actually deliberately created the fake volume was immaterial.

UTXOs remain the best way to track overall market use and movement. Through this, you can plainly see that the last year of market activity has been thin, just traders competing with each other. With one notable exception in Nov/Dec of 2018 causing the big dump. This was one of the most singular events in Bitcoin history, with old coins fueling a major drop in price.