Equities are investment vehicles. If you choose to trade them, that's your decision - but you will lose, on average. 95% of day traders lose money [1]. Zero-sum financial instruments like futures and options and cryptocurrencies are trading vehicles. These are not the same.
Both are trading vehicles and are treated the same by traders [1] similar to the VIX. Hedge funds, asset management companies and institutions spend their time and their clients money trading, not investing [2]. For groups like these, trading is where the money is.
The VIX is a synthetic index whose value is derived from the implied volatility of the S&P 500 index options (computed from the premium of around-the-money options on the SPX cash index a certain amount of time ahead), without fundamentals, tradeable only via futures contracts and ETFs that own those futures.
It's a second derivative tradeable only via third derivative.
This is very very zero-sum.
The overwhelming majority of these actively managed funds fail to beat the returns of the S&P 500. [1]
In fact over 15 years 92% of actively managed large-cap funds trail the returns of the S&P 500.
A lot of semi educated traders frankly don't care. They follow crowd psychology based idioms with risk management. Cryptos are just a more volatile asset class to profit on.
[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/how-to-invest/stocks/day-trad...