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I claim no particular expertise in the minutiae of what Richard Spencer or whoever said or theorised in the late 2010s - this is just going to be a comment from the outside.
As it seemed to me over the last few years, 'the alt-right' never really existed at all. There may have originally been a small minority of nutjobs who claimed the term (re: Spencer), but if so they were very few and for all practical purposes insignificant. Rather, what 'alt-right' came to mean was an amorphous, never properly-defined category term similar to 'far-right' or 'right-wing extremist'.
What the term meant was 'right-wing but beyond the pale' - it became a term for people who are unacceptably right-wing. It means right-wing-but-kooky, or right-wing-but-not-respectable. As such it never had clear referents, but always mutated in the moment to mean politicians or thinkers on the right that the speaker happens to believe are crazy or extreme. Thus for example, here in Australia, I remember hearing American commentators suddenly saying that Clive Palmer is alt-right (he's certainly a rich clown; does that make you alt-right?), or that Pauline Hanson is alt-right (she's an insurgent anti-immigrant politician; does that make you alt-right? does it make a difference that she's been doing it since the 1990s, with minimal change?), and it was very clear that 'alt-right' is not an organic category. It just means being on the right, but without notional legitimacy.
Is there a word for how political labels tend to expand over time? Definition inflation? I feel 'alt-right' is an example of that. Perhaps once it just meant whatever it was that Richard Spencer was on about, but that group was small and irrelevant and no good as a bogeyman. So it expands to mean something like 'whatever it is that Donald Trump is on about' or 'anti-establishment right' and it comes to mean almost nothing.
It just doesn't seem like a term with much practical use any more, if it ever had any.
I agree with you, but an important factor is also that when people say "Alt-right" they are associating them with the White Nationalist type, even if they are just the "not-respectable-right" type. So in the eyes of the public, the single-issue Pro-life voter (who often would otherwise have been a Democrat!) is now associated with white nationalism, and the number of Nazis has surged from <1% to a significant number. Conflating these two serves the Left just fine, as they get the satisfaction of a good righteous fight against Literal Hitler by doing something as easy as punching Alt-Right Uncle Joe at Thanksgiving.
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I only first heard of the alt right and Richard Spencer when Hillary Clinton mentioned them in one of her public speeches in 2016. After looking them up, then I first got exposure to the cast of characters. It seemed they never had a strong network or domestic infrastructure behind them, apart from right-wing publishing houses like Arktos and Counter-Currents. People like Jared Taylor and AmRen have been around for a long time but unsurprisingly never made it into the mainstream. The closest you had to that was Charles Murray when The Bell Curve was published, and he resurfaced again and interest in his work was rediscovered when he appeared on Sam Harris podcast.
To your point about it always teetering on the balance of being nebulous and fringe, there's an established literature out there that's explained why these kinds of movements always stay on the sidelines and never break out.
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