Have you ever played a game like counter-strike? They have these cosmetic skins you can buy for your weapons. People wind up spending hundreds of dollars on these. But why? It's just a digital asset. Arguably less valuable than an NFT because it's hard to convert into real money.
So why do people buy cometic items like that? Spending hundreds or thousands of dollars? Or what about baseball cards? Or Stamps? Sure they are technically scarce but most of that is manufactured. Rare pokemon cards are just made of ink and cardboard. You could say the same thing about an original piece of art rather than a print of it.
Myself I've never really got into any of that stuff. But as far as I can tell the draw (beyond investing) is status. When you have the rare item in counter-strike people are wowed and are driven to buy new cosmetics to keep up with the Joneses.
In crypto having certain NFt's is already a status symbol. I've already heard stories in passing of people discreetly showing that they just happened to have a couple crypto punks on their phone (NFTs worth millions of dollars each).
So yeah the last thing here, the amounts. These crazy crazy amounts. In some cases hundreds of millions for one NFT.
On the one hand there must be some amount of sketchy shit going on there. Crypto in general is almost like this wire that connections the regular economy to the underground markets in a way that they feel more tightly coupled now.
As I understand there are some tax scams, artificially inflating prices etc.
But I don't think that accounts for everything. Crypto holders like status as much as most people. And they are also much richer than most people.
Seems like very rich people competing for trading cards to me.
I don't know what will ultimately be built out of NFTs, if anything. They do honestly seem pretty interesting to me but the issue you pointed out of it costing a lot of money to even create or buy them is definitely annoying. My hope would be that gets solved on Ethereum or another chain through technical means or a massive price crash.