They would've also been worlds better if they had parked their money in Gamestop, or honestly even in a casino, but that doesn't make it a sound investment
“Orange reddit” was one of the first places that Bitcoin was discussed. Consequently there’s an awful lot of people here who know exactly how much they missed out, and express this by being saltier than dead sea whenever the topic comes up. The accepted wisdom on HN, when the bitcoin price was in the single digits, was that it was a “tulip bubble” and you should absolutely not buy it under any circumstances.
The accepted wisdom is still that it's a bubble and you should not buy it, the price going up does not necessarily mean that the price isn't higher than it should be. Projecting everybody who disagrees with your viewpoint as somebody who is angry they missed out is simply a quick way to hand-wave away people who disagree with your crypto-is-the-future dogma. I wasn't in the early adopters per-say but I did do some crapcoin trading back in the day and made a decent sum at the time, and yet I still hold crypto and blockchain technology as a whole as almost entirely pointless. I have still yet to hear any real valid use of the technology that is better than existing/alternative solutions. It speaks volumes that the people who would know the most about the technology (software engineers, who are prevalent here), are the ones who (outside of the general public) believe that the technology is largely pointless, if not downright idiotic.
And many people were scammed and lost their savings to BTC and other crypto schemes. It's funny how the Ponzi promoters always forget that part when touting whatever cooked-up reason they promote crypto for.
But sure, in a sector where most of the biggest names are fraudsters, some people still manage to be adherents.
I first read about Bitcoin on Slashdot. I thought it was a stupid idea back then, and I think it's a stupid idea now. Buying bitcoin in 2008 would have been a terrible investment decision regardless of whatever result it might have produced. If you don't understand that an investment decision can't be evaluated after the fact on the basis of the outcome of single random event you know nothing about investing.