People looking from the outside of NFTs seem to believe this kind of wash trading is a dominant source of volume. In my experience, it's pretty rare and there's a lot of organic demand around each new "hot" NFT. A better way to think of these is each successful NFT series is a mini-bubble, people inside the scene develop an instinct for features might make an NFT desirable but no one can accurately guess the top. So they play hot potato with each other, where buying earlier increases chances of a successful exit.