A notable example here are the "pre-sale investment groups", which essentially consists of morally corrupt criminals buying tokens pre-release e.g. for 2 cents, which will then be listed on major exchanges for 50 cents initial price. You can probably imagine what happens to everyone buying the token for 50 cents on release. This has gone so far that these "investment" groups had to come up with "vesting schedules", which are essentially designed to keep them from dumping on *each other*, in addition to keeping them from selling too much too fast and dumping the price and "painting bad charts".
This is also not a niche venture that only happens with a few select tokens, it's become a completely normal procedure that happens with almost every single new token, and insanely enough even the people further down the food chain have accepted this procedure as a reasonable fact and don't even question it any more. "Of course bro, whales provide liquidity"
I totally agree that protocols like Aave, Curve and some others are extremely cool and useful technology, however, I've come to the preliminary conclusion that the degenerate disgrace that makes up 99% of the space now is permanently and irreversibly damaging reputation to a point where this technology might be ignored despite being useful and solid.