There are various vague touching points of NFTs and real world collectables like baseball cards, but they are not the same. Artificial scarcity is one of them, e.g. there is no reason why there couldn't be a billion baseball cards of the most expensive kind (which would make them stop being the most expensive). Somebody else could create fake ones, but they would have little value for the fact that they are not genuine, which can be verified. You can make the very same arguments for an NFT, including that they are genuine based on who issued them.
But a baseball card, or a Lego set have value on their own. Their collectable value stems from the fact that they are desired as such, and the scarcity makes the price of a certain type go up. Somebody might buy them just to show off or speculate, but another might be a huge Lego nerd and buy the rarest set just to feel joy by looking at it. But an NFT has no value beyond the scarcity. Nobody feels human joy by looking at an NFT beyond being able to show off that they are able to basically burn money in the "i am rich" app type of way. Thus it can only remain a toy for the rich. A van Gogh painting is most likely just a speculation and a show off object, but I might buy a painting from a local artist for $200 because I like it, and to put it on my wall so it makes me happy because it reminds of something nice. I will not buy a $200 NFT just to say I have one too.
Yeah, I follow Peter Mohrbacher who's a surrealist fantasy artist. I've bought some physical prints from him (not even originals or anything, just normal art prints) because I like his art and wanted to have it on my wall and preferred to pay him for a proper print than print a digital copy myself. He also at some point made some NFT sales and I really tried to find a reason to get excited but just couldn't.
I can understand why he was, though, because on his particular platform, artists get a cut of future resale of their art. So he sells a piece for $100, someone later sells it for $200, and he gets a 5% cut (made-up number, I don't remember what exactly it was) for an extra 10 bucks, and so on (but it's still always just a digital token, not a physical piece).
But that doesn't require NFTs to happen. Since it was a proprietary platform, a plain old database could have done the exact same thing.
> e.g. there is no reason why there couldn't be a billion baseball cards of the most expensive kind (which would make them stop being the most expensive)
This is a hilarious contradiction. You are saying there can be a billion baseball cards of the most expensive kind that are at the same time not the most expensive kind.
But a baseball card, or a Lego set have value on their own. Their collectable value stems from the fact that they are desired as such, and the scarcity makes the price of a certain type go up. Somebody might buy them just to show off or speculate, but another might be a huge Lego nerd and buy the rarest set just to feel joy by looking at it. But an NFT has no value beyond the scarcity. Nobody feels human joy by looking at an NFT beyond being able to show off that they are able to basically burn money in the "i am rich" app type of way. Thus it can only remain a toy for the rich. A van Gogh painting is most likely just a speculation and a show off object, but I might buy a painting from a local artist for $200 because I like it, and to put it on my wall so it makes me happy because it reminds of something nice. I will not buy a $200 NFT just to say I have one too.