Nah. Few of the top cryptos (not counting ICOs I guess) are actually marketed. Bitcoin and Ethereum, among others, are more successful than technologically superior altcoins because people care about value far more than the underlying technology. Even if you market a clearly better alt that scales better, is free to transfer, has smart contracts, is fully anonymous, etc., there will still be those who will choose Bitcoin or Ethereum simply because they're more valuable.
Either way, an altcoin being technologically superior doesn't mean it's automatically better. Aside from value, there are other factors into play, such as miner and community support, merchant acceptance, etc. and a combination of those could easily trump superior underlying tech.
A reason for the hype over bitcoin just recently is because of it's high value and rapid price increase for the last few months of 2017. People didn't want to miss out on this and were frantic to buy and get on the continually increasing coin, which is said to continue to increase in the future. People didn't even know about it's function but wanted to buy it anyway. It's demand went crazy and this was not because of it's technological brilliance - but for it's high value.
Another reason why people chose bitcoin over other coins is because there are more platforms and mediums of exchanges for it to use it with unlike with the other coins.