The whole things feels like a scam to me. Taking the best part about digital goods (that they’re non-rival) and attempting to hack on scarcity for the purpose of exploiting a psychological flaw.
The most charitable interpretation is that it's a way to reward artists for creating digital art in a new way.
The HN article for this comment thread shows the risk here though. If the monetary incentives become pushing these tokens, then the most successful 'creators' will be the people that can maximize getting people to pay for these dumb tokens. The incentives are bad and you end up with the 'artists' being mostly ICO style scammers.
It's like the corrupting influence of ads on media, tokens value will be a similar but different corrupting influence.
You could argue how is this different than monetizing anything? I think it's because of the pseudo-value/speculation driving people to spend more on the hope of a future return. That's the psychological hack of fake scarcity.
These tokens are already diversified beyond anyones control.
Tokens take that a step further and make it worse.
Incentives create the world. On one side you have Apple Arcade trying to align incentives for a better global outcome/end state. On the other you have in-app purchases, loot boxes, and NFTs - trying to maximize profit for the house.
A stone is a physical object, some stones are worth more than others.
You can call the fact that humans apply value to thing a scam but that would give you a suboptimal understanding of the world.