The money behind big tech has mastered manipulating demand and that is exactly what you are seeing in the Ethereum/NFT ecosystem.
It is one giant fraud bankrolled by unlimited capital that can artificially increase prices at which point there becomes demand from people in fear of missing out, once the early capital has the suckers locked in the prices plateau at first as the capital stops buying and driving the price up, and then begins a steep crash as they cash out and lock in the gains, this only causes fear and panic among the late entries that made investments at the peak which they couldn't afford to lose...rinse and repeat.
The NFTs may be even more blatant and egregious than the ERC20 coins in terms of fake sales driving up interest, media and demand for shit no regular investor will ever flip. A lot of it is just transparent fraud and money laundering, with the people involved not even shying away from it but openly justifying it on the basis they feel the stock market and art collectors have always engaged in the same misconduct.
Take Elon Musk, openly pumping Doge...I'm not judging, I get the humor in it, but a lot of people have been crushed over the years in the crypto bubbles, yesterday was a prime example where Elon was likely the sole cause of Doge exploding in value (maybe 5x in a few days and 100x over a month) and as the big money way slowly cashing out these massive media campaigns were behind a marketing scam of "DogeDay" essentially making their killing on the backs of the poor uneducated late investors. One would hope his Tweets shined a bright light on the dystopia of it all, but it seems everyone is either so greedy or in such bad positions financially they would rather take part.
My guess is now that they have reaped their profits at the expense of the little guy, they will buy back in with the profits and we should see another pump following the -25% DogeDay scam.