I got the impression that the PolyMC situation was quite different, with that developer masking it and doing a minority of the work, but after one change made by the rest of the developers they snapped, used their control over the repository to remove the rest of the maintainers and take sole control over the repository.
I was aware of some shenanigans and hostility from PolyMC and never used it, but I got the impression there were no major outward signs before that happened?
Just want to add to that, NFTs aren’t inherently about artificial scarcity, they could also be used to track ownership of rights or real life items without a central authority that everybody needs to trust.
Of course, cryptobros immediately went to pushing them as an investment scheme, and the actual implementations are slow, inefficient, and downright expensive to use. I don’t think anybody has managed to make NFTs actually useful, but I imagine the original creators weren’t looking to create… Whatever this is.