IOTA actually had a very good momentum during the 2017 ATH times, believe me there wasn't all that many ICO's that went up as much as that, people were funding coins left and right and only few of them had the chance the IOTA got. People who invested in the top coins like btc, eth, xrp and whatever started to look at other coins as well and the biggest jump was made by IOTA during those days, everyone was talking about like it was the next big thing. People seriously considered to call it something above crypto for a while, it wasn't just an altcoin, it was something newer and different and better.
Nowadays it gets attention due to the board members suing each other over some tokens that they basically made all thanks to investors yet claims its theirs.
LoL IOTA was always a vaporware. There were massive I mean MASSIVE amount of IOTA shills everywhere (zerohedge, reddit, btt etc) during the 2017 pump and none of them are around anymore. (We have nano fucks instead)
The people that was hyping that shitcoin you were seeing were getting paid to spread that bullshit. It was being manufactured.
They literally dumped on the clueless noobs from the ATH prices. That's why most alts performed a lot worse than BTC during the bear market.