How do we tell “the market” from the half a billion fake dollars being pumped into the exchanges each day and the fake volume being traded between exchanges that hold significant amounts of USDT they know have no value when hell comes down but they need to respect until that point to keep the delusion going long enough to make more on new crypto than they are already under water?

I have a sense that a healthy maker analysis would show that the market does indeed care, but there’s to much fraud in the mix for it to be clear unless you dig out the details.

Give it time. Almost no one knows what Tether is. It's also a really technical, and thus niche, topic, not a lot of people understand the scam. Eventually a regulator body will finally do something about it.

The market creates the "truth".