I've only really started learning about crypto and I don't really see the point to all these million different exchange tokens.
Most of them just seem to speculative tokens with no actual function as far as I can see

What do you think?
Exchanges can run without their own token but these days exchanges develop their own token to create value. For sure, when the price of the exchange token increase, the real benefices are the owners of the exchange. Everyone wants to make money so exchanges also don't wanna miss out on getting profits by creating their own token.