This is the key difference: you have been conspicuously unable to provide examples of a competitive service. Nobody in the 90s internet struggled to do that, and they rarely were asked to because there were so many cases where the internet did something useful that even a casual follower of the news would be aware of. There were plenty of dodgy companies but they weren’t the only ones, and existing major businesses were also jumping on board.
“Buy plane tickets”
“Find rare books”
“See movie showtimes”
“Sell unwanted items”
And so on.
You can’t do that with NFTs because the whole thing is bullshit.
- The ability to publicly and immediately prove ownership (chain of provenance) to a third party.
- Multi-signatories, the ability for one or more parties to have joint cryptographic ownership over the token. For a pre-defined number of those owners (majority, 2 of 5, all members etc) to be able revoke, change, transfer the token as required, again without an intermediary.
https://youtu.be/kNgTR5lii4M?t=25m33s
This is just one clip but the point is, referring back to the OP, the idea that NFTs have failed, that they are useless, that it’s just a load of bullshit is just another way of saying you have a very narrow understanding of tokenisation in the main.
This is the only one that isn't nonsense word salad. But it's simply not true.
The intermediary for a blockchain transaction is the group of people who run that blockchain.
The intermediary of PayPal is the group of people who run PayPal.
And so on. You can tell they are intermediaries because without them you can't transfer the value. There's no way to do it just between the two of you, you need this loosely organized group of people in between the two of you.
And that loosely organized group of people, it turns out, is WAY less reliable than basically every other option.
Reading all the comments here, the sentiment over NFTs is clearly reductionist ("just monkey JPGs") and based on a very limited understanding of the fundamental benefits of the technology. Most of the real world benefits are overshadowed by this kind of sentiment and shows a clear lack of knowledge and research from the wider community.
If you truly are technically literate, you'll know the mainstream view of any nascent technology is always very weak and sensationalist (the headline in the OP a good example). If you were well versed in NFTs and DLT technology you'll know there is new ground being broken here. Your last sentence tells me that you are not well informed on the subject. If you were, you would not be saying such things and understand the computer science behind the core concepts.
So yes, whilst the NFT space is largely full of scams and is apparently useless, that doesn't mean there isn't a viable technology at play which has major benefits in multiple industries.