People believe in them as a rule because they cherry pick the few cycles that conform and ignore the massive number of cycles that don’t conform. Gartner hype cycles don’t describe every hype cycle. They describe a miraculously small number of them, the ones that actually bore some fruit. But as usual, give a concept a fancy name and people will start believing in it as though it were some law of nature. In reality, it describes an exception to the actual law of nature. There are a handful of technologies that ever passed the “trough of disillusionment.”