Yes, $HBAR, $ADA, and $LINK all had better price performance than $DAG. That's true and worth saying directly. It's also not the argument.

Hedera launched in 2018 and spent six years fielding the exact complaints filling the $DAG feeds right now. Enterprise vaporware. Nothing happening. Real institutional traction didn't start compounding until 2024.
Cardano launched in 2017 and took until 2021 to deliver smart contracts. The vaporware accusations during those quiet years were louder than anything being said about $DAG today.
Chainlink went years of slow, unglamorous building before it became the dominant oracle layer with real enterprise integrations. None of them went straight up. All of them had long, painful periods where the price said nothing was working and the infrastructure said otherwise.
$DAG is in that period. The difference is what's actually been built.
Six years of Department of War collaboration through Iron SPIDR. Panasonic Toughbook deployments. A 120-node production network with zero transaction fees and sub-second writes on a DAG architecture that gets faster as it grows, not slower.
Digital Evidence live in production with court-admissible records, a Common Crawl partnership anchoring AI training data provenance on chain, and an MCP server already integrating with AI agent workflows
Now AIAI Holdings acquiring Constellation, filing for a Nasdaq listing, with $25 million in committed growth capital specifically for scaling the network and accelerating ecosystem adoption. That's a regulated, publicly listed corporate structure. Hedera and Cardano didn't have that at the equivalent stage.
The five-year wait has been brutal. The infrastructure it produced is real. Those two things are both true at the same time.