I appreciate the optimism. But I think most people that should be interested or at least open to bitcoin won't know that bitcoin isn't the same as bitcoin _core_ -- they'll just hear "bitcoin" and "Epstein" too close to each other in the same sentence and say "Uh, I'm out."
Discussion
Not so much optimism but a realistic assumption based on how self interested the average person is, coupled with which enemies I think are priority #1 for the powers that be. Will some folks react how you described above? Absolutely, those will be there too, but in my estimation they’ll be a very small minority. In other words we aren’t going to see a crash to 50k because of it. I could be wrong on all fronts. We’ll just wait and see what sort of impact, if any, this will have.