I think you have to look at art and collecting art in general to get an idea of what is happening. When rich people spend big money on art, it is less about having a nice painting and more about things like flexing wealth, tax avoidance, being part of the provenance or whatever. People think that the most expensive painting ever sold, Salvator Mundi, which sold for ~450m, is sitting in storage somewhere in Switzerland. You also have to consider that for these people, it isn't actually a lot of money for them. They are the foundation for the mania that dogpiles on top.

These early NFTs are going to be like the early works of an art movement, and the iconic ones are probably going to be valuable to some degree just because of their place in art history. The art world has probably been waiting for the next kind of innovative movement to come along too. It is sort of a self fulfilling prophecy in that the ones that are bought for absurd amounts of money create the buzz that solidifies them as iconic pieces of the movement. Most will probably end up being worthless.

Art NFTs are like a tiny proof of concept of the idea of NFTs having value. The space, like crypto, is like a sandbox of primitives and people are just figuring things out, throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. That creative environment is probably alluring to people in boring dev jobs who have the financial flexibility to explore. I think it just looks stupid to many because it is basically a completely chaotic wild west where basically nobody knows what is actually going on in terms of a big picture, and so much dumb stuff happens which the media loves talking about for clickbait so that is what everyone sees and uses to form their opinion of it.