My friend has a real Picasso. It’s a lithograph print, one of maybe 30+ of that image. It’s worth maybe $5k only. How is that scarcity any truer than an NFT? Picasso could have printed as many as he wanted, and indeed, printed so many that the value today is not very high.

In both cases, an artist merely places their “this is official” stamp on something that is effectively a copy, and limits the number of copies available based on the desired economics for their work. And the fact that the “official” version is worth more than a “fake”, is merely because humans value genuineness and provenance, even when the end product is indiscernibly different.