it obviously depends on the nature of the protests and how the dialectically opposed forces are interacting, there's no "formula" for this

the 2013 protests in brazil were initially good in spite of my country being under a slightly anti-imperialist government, because their demands were reasonable, their targets were correct, and the PT needed to get their shit straight

but later on, with the repression coming from the PT centrists, our left failed to maintain hegemony, the protests were ultimately overtaken by US-funded ngos and think tanks, a lot of astroturfed shit popped up everywhere, and the continuation of the protests, which were initially good and based, ended up helping set the conditions for the 2016 coup

i have no protest fetish and no binary understanding of them either - despite how popular they might be, sometimes they're good and legit, sometimes they're astroturfed to shit and bad, with numerous possibilities in-between, and their nature changes as the forces involved interact with each other