When a crypto token's on-chain activity rises, what would make you doubt it reflects real demand?

Rising transaction counts and active addresses often get read as a sign of growing adoption. But these metrics can be inflated by wash transfers between a user's own wallets, airdrop farming, bot activity, or exchange hot-wallet shuffling, none of which says much about people actually wanting to use the network. The question I keep returning to is which metric would separate the two. Fees paid per transaction, the share of transactions above a certain size, or how long holders keep their coins without moving them may tell a different story from raw counts. I am not sure any single one is reliable, and the data providers themselves disagree on how they label exchange addresses. So what would you check first before accepting that on-chain growth is genuine demand, and what evidence would change your mind?