I only follow two YouTube personalities because they are very informative and entertaining. Coffeezilla (who you linked to) and LegalEagle. (Coffeezilla even made an appearance once in a LegalEagle video to explain crypto stuff.)
You should take most things with a grain of salt on YouTube, but those places are pretty solid. Coffeezilla (who styles himself tongue-in-cheek as an “internet detective”) has actually been involved in busting real-life scams.
The New Yorker even wrote an article about him.
He’s pretty legit.
I do personally decry the conflation of “Ponzi scheme” with general financial scams, but some crypto groups do operate as Ponzi schemes.
Sometimes that is what is going on with cryptocurrency, though. An example is the “Save the Kids” scheme. (Another one that Coffeezilla helped expose, and was later sued for it.)
It was a scam from the beginning. They made a coin that they knew from the beginning was going to fail, just as you know a Ponzi scheme will eventually fail. They paid influencers to hype it up, and then when it went live, people bought in. Those people who bought in were inflating the price, which encouraged more investors, and more, and then those “in the know” who were part of the scam sold their shares, and the whole thing tanked. It was orchestrated from the beginning; it wasn’t a sincere attempt that failed. This is typically referred to as a “rug pull”, using the imagery of someone pulling the rug out from unsuspecting people who end up falling on their butts. It’s so ubiquitous among crypto schemes that many projects go out of their way to assure people that there is no rug pull intended as they start. (Even though often they are proved to be lying.)
The New York Times even wrote a recent article describing how these online Ponzi schemes are done.
I would agree with you that not all NFTs or cryptocurrencies are Ponzi schemes. There are many that are legitimate, and they succeed or fail while the people operating them are making a sincere effort to succeed. But it’s also true that many of them are. It’s an area where there are no regulations and many people get away with fraud without prosecution, so it’s inevitable that this sort of scam is going to be rampant.