I understand that in the great scheme of things is just a group of people that values scarcity, but you don't need to go deeper to see it's more then that.
People don't just value baseball cards because there's a designed scarcity for particular players and there's a consensus that a specific card is valuable.
You're missing the history of a game that took many years to establish themselves and grew a base of followers and fans over decades. It's a competitive game, with different leagues, with teams that have fans.
This is why the cards have value, and there's no consensual agreement that X and Y card is valuable, it's something so simple and intuitive that even children understand this. Even if it's just by the transactions in their playground among colleagues and friends (not because many people have some card, and everyone seems to want it, but because it's represents a popular player and it's a rare card - that's why they want it).
Then there's plenty of sub sections of this, like you said: misprints, particular years, etc.
But it all revolves around a cultural event.
What you're seeing with NFTs are assets created for the sake of being unique - it's not consequential of anything. It's designed to be that way.
It's like they turned the baseball card analogy upside down - they created NFTs for the sake of being NFTs, it's not serving any purpose and scarcity has no logic behind it. I think the closest analogy would be the Beanie Babies, that were trying to hack this mechanic with nothing else to support it no other then "they are scarce".
There's no emotional bond to it, it doesn't serve the purpose of a game (like balance wise), it's not even merchandising to promote something that's eventually going to become popular and that's popular to a specific niche.