When this hit the news, lions thought how neat it would be to assign unique ownership to any arbitrary piece of data instead of that which is strictly a coin & to do it with no central authority.  Apparently, this utopia doesn't exist even though every crypto currency & token has been marketed as something which lacks a central authority.

NFT's are currently all managed by 1 company, rarible.com.  They manage the NFT blockchain & charge fees to convert data into an NFT.  The ownership of every NFT is logged in the etherium blockchain & there's only 1 blockchain.  The logging of all tokens in a single authoritative blockchain is what establishes ownership.  If anyone could create a new authoritative blockchain, they could define any ownership of the tokens.

The data types they support are currently just image & sound files.  More importantly, the NFT blockchain doesn't contain the full content.  It doesn't even contain a hash of the content, but contains metadata like a filename or a description.  It's all kind of a shell game.

There's no out of box software for anyone to create their own NFT blockchain & sign their own arbitrary type of data.  There are guys who show how to do it with a bunch of tools on the goo tubes, but no turnkey NFT script.

NFT's seemed a lot more practical to lions than cryptocurrencies.  It seemed like the natural evolution of cryptocurrencies was for everyone to create their own blockchain, leading to 10 billion different blockchains for new currencies with no monetary value.  An NFT in contrast, could always have some value in the form of the digital content that was originally made non fungible.

The only piece of data so far which truly can be assigned ownership without a central authority is a public/private keypair.  No matter how hard anyone tries, they can never decrypt data encrypted by the public key unless they own the matching private key, thus ownership is possible without a central authority or a blockchain.  If public keys alone were artwork & animals enjoyed staring at 2048 random bits on their screens, ownership of artwork could be easily established without a central authority.

It's not so easy to declare ownership by signing data with a private key.  Anyone else can sign the same data & declare ownership.  Only allowing the data to be viewed on a special player with a special public key has been tried before.  Even the encryption gootube uses has long been hacked.  A watermark can be taken out or 1 bit can be changed to change the owner of the watermark.

 An NFT scheme can't decide how much of a change to a piece of data constitutes a new unique piece of data.  Anyone can change 1 bit & declare ownership of the data with the changed bit.

What makes NFT's possible may be a generational shift more than a technological capability.  Generation X would say no self proclaimed authority like rarible.com or the etherium blockchain can be absolute.  Millennials view any self proclaimed authority as absolute.