beanie babies were booming as an investment vehicle, buying one was trivial, many people received very tangible value.

It'll be interesting when there is more distinction between the two in utility. LLMs already have a fair amount of utility in their relatively early stages and I've certainly seen meaningful adoption of diffusion model generated images to replace stock photo usage.

> beanie babies were booming as an investment vehicle, buying one was trivial, many people received very tangible value.

were volumes and convenience(e.g. liquidity, automation, etc) comparable to crypto?

Investments is huge market, it is hard for me to track what are the current volumes of crypto tradings and holdings, but it still can be significant.