Of course there were some marks mixed in somewhere, by definition, but the premise that there was ever real demand for this from anyone is pretty dubious.
Having said that, I recently finally saw an art project I actually think makes sense as an NFT. Don't remember its name, but it's artist selling actual rights to their works on an auction to people that want to invest in the pieces, people trading the art NFTs, with the art piece being stored securely, and then one day if someone wants the physical piece for themselves, they can burn the NFT to request it's delivery.
Speaking of art, we did a project ~6 years ago, where we released ERC20 tokens attached to physical objects - imho this makes way more sense, because it allows for a fractional ownership of art/collectibles. Ideas like this make way more sense than NFTs.
I feel like the idea of NFTs representing some right of redemption or ownership in the physical world was a fairly common NFT scheme / use-case back in the day.
Am I missing something?
That's why you have storage houses for artworks, and artists often sell their artworks to collectors but keep it in possession for years. Also people own artworks but "rent out" to galleries - which makes it a win-win, and a free storage for them :)