Summary: “I was pretty sure NFTs were pointless, but they’re so hyped that I thought I must be missing something. So I bought one and sure enough, they are pointless.”
Or are there various cabals manipulating the price and hype? I've heard there are money laundering schemes underlying a lot of it, but there can't be that much criminal money out there.
There can be and there is, especially in cryptocurrency. The only economic use for Bitcoin back in its early days was in black market transactions. The holders of early extremely large positions in crypto are techie early adopters who liked messing around with the technology (significant, but only gets you so far), and criminal groups. The former are probably more interested in the crypto ecosystem, the latter are highly motivated to find ways to turn their massive positions into cash.
That isn't to say that every high-priced or weird NFT purchase/crypto transaction/whatever is part of a nefarious money laundering scheme, just that if there are spaces that make money laundering easier, you can bet that people with money to launder are trying to take advantage of them in general.
Consider ransomware, for example. When a company pays up, the ransomware vendor ends up with a huge chunk of cryptocurrency they need to launder before converting it into cash -- and shuffling it through both real and fake sales of NFTs could be a highly effective way of doing that.