Most or maybe all of them basically had "no reason to live" more than a "cause of death".

Anyone can cook up a coin by forking Bitcoin or Litecoin and do a search-and-replace on the name in the code and nothing else.

> Anyone can cook up a [new whatever] by forking and do a search-and-replace

Reminds me of how people created a plethora of new browsers on Windows systems by calling a Windows library function that creates a browser. If you didn't know better, you might think that they spent a million man-hours writing a new browser from scratch.

Kinda like all the browsers in the IOS App Store.

And after testing them, discover that they all break in identical ways.

And around 2014, that's exactly where most new cryptocurrencies were coming from. IIRC, there were even a few web sites which would automatically perform that customization for you.