Lots of interesting links there. But the pieces of your arguments are so diverse, there is no single coherent answer. In the technological field so diverse, you can always find bad things, if you are looking for them.

I’ll just answer the first and the last point.

In other words, it’s designed to provide pay-off to those who jump-in early, as long as they convince more people to jump in, and assuming they get out early enough.

Here you really are describing a Ponzi scheme. By this logic, every currency (with the possible exceptions of gold and bitcoin) are ponzi schemes. Central banks print banknotes (or X tokens) which are worthless. They only have value because people start to believe they have value. And the central banks use this confidence trick to make money. They more tokens/banknotes they print, the more money they make.

Financial Times might actually have a reasonably good understanding what a Ponzi scheme is

This does not describe a Ponzi scheme. It describes a fiat currency. “Ponzi was paying earlier investors using the investments of later investors”. He created an investment fund, not a currency. There is no way you could confuse those two things. And a pyramid scheme is also an unrelated thing. But you’re just as capable of looking this up as I am.