I think this stuff is very silly / trivial, but this - "why does anyone give a shit about it enough to put it on the blockchain" - suggests that blockchains are somehow only for serious things (things people "give a shit" about) and I don't at all see why that would be the case.

Where I work, you get "badges" - little icons - that show up on your corporate profile for various things you do, writing some number of lines of some language, attending some training, joining some mailing list, etc. Anyone can make a badge and give it to anyone. It's just a big public (inside the company) database. It's all very silly and trivial and nobody "gives a shit" about these badges. And yet they still exist and people still create new ones.

I don't see any reason throwing this same kind of thing on a public blockchain is any more silly than this.

But maybe the criticism is that (as is often the case in the crypto world) this is being presented / talked about / sold as some kind of next huge serious thing. If that's the criticism, then I'm right there with you. But if the criticism is just "this is pretty silly", well, lots of stuff is, so what.