Recently, I saw a bunch of people watching on-chain large transfers, exchange hot and cold wallet movements, and then concluding with "smart money is here"... Basically, address profiling is mostly just a "clue," not "evidence."

Many tags are based on clustering and behavior patterns: the same batch of gas, the same signing habits, the same fund flow, can indeed piece together a bunch of addresses to look like "the same person/organization," but it's also easy to lump together different people involved in custody, market making, arbitrage, or multi-signature wallets into a single "whale."
Not to mention, some intentionally use relay, splitting, or cross-chain transfers to lead you astray.
Now, when I look at fund flows, I only ask two things: what kind of risk the money is coming from, and what kind of risk it is going into (stable yields/leverage/long-tail retail), and whether it’s willing to "stay" on-chain rather than just passing through.
As for everything else... just treat it as gossip.
What I’ve learned isn’t techniques, but not to package uncertainty as certainty.