The entire crypto market cap is about $2.8T, which makes it about 75% as big as Apple. Would the same argument make sense if the author were to say Apple employees alone "push up prices for houses, resort hotels, and all sorts of other things they do with their money". Kind of a stretch if you ask me.
Crypto provides banking services (savings, moving money, exchanging overseas money, pensions, mortgages, ...) which in a lot of countries are normally entirely exploited by the government to the point that crypto is far superior. And yes, of course that means it's for dodging taxes, moving criminal gains, and dodging sanctions by Russia and North Korea.
But in many countries "exploited" means that the country is so corrupt that "yes, but your crypto savings can disappear overnight" is not a very good argument against crypto, because the normal system has the same problem. In some countries the very currency of the country itself has that problem, and it's not always hyperinflation. For example, I've heard quite a few times from Chinese people that they prefer bitcoin over Yuan, just for the ability to dodge the banking system. Apparently one factor is that normal people can't use Yuan outside of China without very strict limits (which is another instance of "why does anyone trade with China? They are never going to allow a fair bidirectional trading relationship with their citizens. Trading with China, you can only lose".
Crypto is also the only way Venezuelans, Egyptians, and many others ... have any banking services at all.
So I would argue crypto is a lot more useful than Apple. Just not to people living in the richest countries.
