Yeah...in the beginning the development was sketchy. They certainly took advantage of NFT hype and got out ahead of their skies. They have several years worth of development under their belt now and have a whole new team, including Chris Clay, former Game Director for MTG: Arena. The difference between a game like Hearthstone and a game like Gods Unchained is the NFT, true ownership of game assets secured by a blockchain. In Hearthstone, the platform controls the cards....In Gods Unchained, the user owns the cards, and they can trade them on the decentralized markets, permissionlessly.
I'm not trying to endorse Gods Unchained, it's just an example of a usecase for NFTs other than goofy ape jpegs and pfps. It's also a good example of how the various layers of abstraction add utility to the NFTs, while maintaining the same level of security, without bloating the main blockchain. Anyway, I'm just saying....I don't think NFTs are going away --> they're just becoming more utilitarian. It's exciting stuff.
Yes. NFTs are becoming more useful than speculative lately. I guess the industry is maturing faster than I've thought. The hype still isn't over yet, so we should expect some speculation in the time-being. With improvements being made in the ETH ecosystem, I don't think NFTs will disappear anytime soon. What needs to be dealt with is the long-term data preservation of an NFT. Centralized servers are not ideal for this kind of new trend. It's the anti-thesis of crypto/Blockchain tech's decentralization and censorship-resistance.
I hope developers make good use of decentralized CDNs like Arweave and IPFS for the good of the industry. Luckily, data from Bitcoin's Ordinals inscriptions are all stored on-chain. ETH, and other similar smart contract platforms need to do this without sacrificing scalability. The sky is the limit to how far NFTs will go. Who knows if buying prominent NFTs now will make you rich in the future? Just my thoughts

About the long-term data preservation of an NFT, which has to be ensured for the security of future potentialities in the growing landscape of crypto possibilities. Decentralized CDNs like Arweave and IPFS will, of course, play a vital role. Bitcoin's Ordinals inscriptions, being stored on-chain, are like a lighthouse guiding a ship that doesn't really exist but signifies a path.
ETH, and the like, need to do this without sacrificing... something, probably scalability. NFTs wont disappear. They will continue to be there, somewhere. Buying prominent NFTs now might indeed make one rich in the future, but one must also consider buying non-prominent ones as they might turn prominent later.