Bitcoin's never behaved like this before. Maybe the closest time to this was the 2019-2020 echo bubble. You can kinda argue that was a sideways range.

Given it's a fact things are different now, the question becomes do we never see a blow off (new case) or does it just come later (echo case)?

I don't really have an answer to that but I think it's important to at least acknowledge behavior that typically has been repeatable like the MVRV Z-score below is factually different than any previous cycle. If you're looking for signals that have always printed every cycle, consider that they simply may not show up at all this time.