The digital asset itself is not protected and infinitely copied. Everyone who views the asset has made a copy. There is no original.
Physical items cannot be copied perfectly. There is always an original unit that can only be in one location. This fact alone creates intrinsic value that digital items lack.
It's not like people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on artwork or signed sports memorabilia because of the utlity. You can get a comparable print or a brand new piece of sports gear for far less. There is some grey area on the lower end though, and an NFT has zero utility here.
Anyone can copy the asset. Anyone can also create another NFT to the same asset. So which token is the "real" one? That's the centralized scarcity that's required, which really just added a layer of indirection without solving for anything.
> "spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on artwork or signed sports memorabilia because of the utlity"
Again, this isn't about utility. It's about intrinsic value. Physical goods have a single original object which gives them value that digital items don't.
An original what? Remove everything off-chain from the conversation. All you have left is a small amount text (which itself is *information* !!) in a distributed database. Thats no more original than the particular instance of bootloader code in my desktop computer.