So yeah it’s basically a marketing expense for NFTs broadly.
"Super Mario Bros. is now jointly owned by three buyers: Jim Halperin, the founder and co-chairman of the collectibles auction company Heritage Auctions,"
classic fake pump of assets you already own a bunch and want to create illusion of value
Pretending two wallet addresses are unaffiliated prior to a transaction is trivial to arrange and with some forethought would be invisible to blockchain analysis. But the superficial story is too juicy for the tech (and now, art) press to ignore, and the people savvy enough to expose the fraud also happen to be elbow deep in Eth/crypto HODLings and stand to benefit far too much by letting it proceed without criticism.
Which is all to say that these are information asymmetry problems, and everything frontier "isn't a durable investment" until it is. It's silly to dodge taxes on-chain when it's free and easy to pull a list of addresses that have the biggest on-chain value, look at how they're tagged on a block explorer, and figure out if they have a US entity that should have reporeted taxes on the transactional history
For that you need to incorporate a whole manner of values.
Cost, direct, indirect, amortised nor not.
Value proposition, both yang ble and intangible.
Scarcity, uniqueness and availability, time to produce, time to reproduce.
This is why it was so abhorrent when bankers and media brought up inherent value of GameStop, it's one small part of the equation and has very little to do with the situation.
The value of high art is purely socially constructed and is an aristocratic class signal.