What baffling is how did they get this popular ? Plenty of stupid things to go around, why this specific one? Who was the marketing genius that convinced a critical mass to buy something worse than sand in the middle of the desert.
At a first level, similar phenomenon to why trading cards or any other collectible fads have their periods of excitement. Is digital beanie babies at all surprising?
Then there were also folks who wanted to use them as an open standard for, like, "metaverse assets" and whatnot. And while there are many different ways to solve that technically, you also have the blockchain proponents looking for any problem that blockchain can solve... So there is the added energy from that synergy as well.
Then I believe there are fairly serious businesses looking at NFTs for things like digital albums sales (or other ways to cultivate and monetize parasocial relationships) while disintermediating the traditional platforms.
My opinion, I am not an expert by any means, I have only read the bitcoin whitepaper and written some very trivial blockchains to further my own understanding:
Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are impressive novel technology, they suit how they are used and work as a fungible token/currency. The underlying tech is impressive, like cryptography, and cannot (backdoors excepted) be broken for its intended purpose. Smart people who understand it recognized the potential and validity of the technology, and so it grew organically and became the phenomenon it is today. There is no technical gotcha, scams are another topic.
The general public's exposure was much more surface level and occurred after the tech had grown organically among technical folks. Now you pay with your CC on a familiar looking website, to buy something everyone says has value. It seems normal, and although you don't understand the underlying tech, you trust it is valuable. Lots of people get rich, lots of people lose money, but BTC remains valuable and the market remains. My elderly mother who is not technically literate is asking me how to invest.
After that, the general public has been conditioned to expect blockchain adjacent tech to be legitimate, they are feeling like they missed the gold rush but there is a new gold rush! NFTs! This time we skip the organic growth of a novel technology, adopted by smart people who understand the underlying tech. Now it is inorganic growth exploiting the crypto hype and pushed by hustlers. There is a legitimate use case for artists but that isn't what is driving the new mania.
This time there are massive technical gotchas (you have a link to a .jpg hosted on a server or servers, you don't own the copyright to anything). People find this out after the hype and massive adoption, if BTC never worked for its purpose it wouldn't have grown organically. NFTs have skipped that. There are torrents with every NFT pulled from these servers to highlight the lack of ownership, of technical control, I can't torrent your Bitcoins but I can download your stoned apes.
This is a long opinion, but it's why I think you see people find out after the fact just how flaky NFTs are.
The use-case may be valid but the implementation doesn't necessarily facilitate it.
I'm stating in the first quote that there is an idea of artists selling their work, but that isn't what is driving the accelerated adoption.
In the second quote I point out some of the technical deficiencies, it is supposed to contrast the first. It doesn't reconcile.
The comment chain is on the topic of why these technical deficiencies are news to so many people, my opinion is that we skipped the scrutiny that BTC experienced and we experienced a gold rush.
