The tulip comparison strikes me as being rather specious. For starters, tulip bulbs of the same variety were absolutely fungible.
It's more like trading cards. If you own some rare rookie card, you don't actually own that baseball player, just a sort of paper token that references the baseball player. But, since people see value in the reference itself, the value of the token ends up deriving from both the player's celebrity and the rarity of the baseball card.
NFTs riff on this concept by being digital, and having it be common for there to be limited runs of only 1.
It's more like trading cards. If you own some rare rookie card, you don't actually own that baseball player, just a sort of paper token that references the baseball player. But, since people see value in the reference itself, the value of the token ends up deriving from both the player's celebrity and the rarity of the baseball card.
NFTs riff on this concept by being digital, and having it be common for there to be limited runs of only 1.