If an artist makes a painting, that original painting has collectible value. If the same artist makes copies of it, those copies have less value. That seems to make sense to most people.
Now imagine if an artist makes a digital painting. Is that work of art any less meaningful or valuable? Of course not. But there's been no way to define an "original" in the digital art form, and so there's been no way to assign collectability to digital works of art. NFTs seem to provide a way for an artist and fans to collectively agree that some digital object is the original, and to treat it as such.
The bonus is that it provides another avenue for digital artists to make money, which to my mind is always a good thing.
I get that the concept is hard to wrap our brains around, because at the end of the day it's a collective delusion. Everyone just agrees to say that some arbitrary string of bytes is the "original" and anything that comes after it isn't. But ultimately how is that different from the arbitrary rules we use to define which physical object is the "original" and why those arbitrary rules define value.
That said, I haven't looked too deeply into the technical side of NFTs, so this is more my take on the concept than the application. I'm sure there's slews of caveats, like how most NFTs only store a hash, the importance of exchanges, etc. And I totally agree that the market was in a huge bubble, so that's definitely worth criticizing (to an extent; I mean people can do whatever the hell they want with their money ultimately.)
Is there a flaw in my take here? Are NFTs somehow more arbitrary and asinine than other collectible markets simply because they're digital? Or is everyone hating because hating new technology is as cool as it has ever been? I suppose Dropbox did turn out to just be git+rsync, so shrug /s