This has been mysterious to me for a long time and it still remains mysterious to me, but I have to accept that people do care. This isn't just limited to NFTs,

This has been mysterious to me for a long time and it still remains mysterious to me, but I have to accept that people do care. This isn't just limited to NFTs, people buy signed copies of things despite signatures being trivial to forge, people buy authentic branded items even when indistinguishable counterfeits are available, people pay more for "original prints" of digital photographs! In short, people care about provenance. NFTs guarantee provenance for data, even if the process of "attaching" it to a jpg or whatever is a bit clunky. I don't understand why people care so much about provenance, but they do, and NFTs provide a partial solution.