You’re right. Both about the problem still being present and NFT being not strictly necessary anyway.
I can’t help but think there must be a way to make it work.
There probably is, provided you can get a perceptual model that correctly models all human visual perception and reduce it to a hash. I am not sure one exists currently. Until then, it really does seem like we're trying to find a way to re-implement trademarks in a way that doesn't require the interpretive work that trademarks rely on.
I suspect there's a lot of complexity hidden in the perceptual model requirement, though.
Of course, neither the NFT nor the sig-in-DNS approach actually solves the problem of a visually identical but technically different image (use a slightly different color in a few places, etc.) being used to trick people. I'm not sure what we've gained. The malicious use case would seem like it's not effectively prevented.