"VC winter" isn't what it seems. The money is going into something else. VCs reduced late stage funding, which was killing unicorns, but they increased early stage funding. For a while, angels stopped investing in early stage to put it into crypto/NFT. Covid had people pulling their money out of travel tech and putting it into gold. Lately there was speculation that bitcoin halving would increase prices again, and so the prices went up long before the halving.

People say there's more AI investment, but AI has always been heavily overinvested since 2015. Even back then, fresh PhDs could expect million dollar annual TC. People who believed AI would eat the world have been buying Google, Meta, Tesla stocks for years because those were the closest. Those stocks aren't rising much. Only recently did retail investors realize that maybe NVIDIA would be profiting from the AI boom as well.

You have to take into account all the delays. Meta didn't drop in stock because they were planning for the Metaverse, it dropped because they admitted that Facebook was no longer their core business. Everyone knew FB was dead for a while, the name change was a catalyst. The metaverse isn't terrible business though - Roblox is bigger than many banks.