During my early introduction to blockchain technology, other than Bitcoin Core, there were a dozen or two ALT coins; yet there were no sh*t coins nor even a coined term at that time if memory serves.
There were coins that had no apparent value yet in fact had one which would be met.
Let's take as example a coin which has paid me for bounty projects as well as Administrative bounties .
The coin is @devcoin. It is forked from Bitcoins and can be merged mined with it. The 21 million cap was lifted and it is a geyser. It was originally created to pay programmers of open source projects. By showing that they had programmed a certain amount of time on open sourced projects in any given year they would then be cut into some calculated percentage of the mining done that cycle.
Whales from Bitcoin or successful traders with the other ALTS would then buy Devcoin as a show of support to the Open Source programmers. Those on the sell column on the exchange would be the programmers and they knew what the coins were worth to them and would HODL and wait.
Then everyone began seeing coins as fiat equivalent and sh*t coins were born.