Purely Speculative Growth

Everyone talks about doing your diligence, learning about the coin before investing. People also make statements about how the coin has such great potential. I'm trying to understand how a coin whose sole utility is as a governance token for a defi platform that may or may not take off. Isn't all this talk about hitting $X dollar amount just pure speculation and not tied to any real world utility that would drive the kinds of numbers people talk about? I looked at other governance tokens to see if I could draw some parallels and sure there are plenty with high prices, but they also have really low supply numbers whereas Ondo is 10B+. What am I missing? I realize most crypto gains aren't tied to any fundamentals these days, so I just want to make sure I understand what I'm betting on.