You can never know what the interest of a particular person in a product is, whether the person owns the product via straw men or whether the person is being paid to promote a product or whether the person benefits indirectly because the promoted product has synergetic potential with some other product the person owns. But there is one huge difference between Michael Saylor and NFT scammers/owners. When Michael Saylor promotes Bitcoin and shares a transaction ID that MSTR bought another 20,000 Bitcoin, then it is true. He had no way to manipulate the market because it is too big and he had to take real money to buy real Bitcoin from a real and verified network.
If an NFT hits the market, we can observe that often times there are irrationally high price purchases going on. But the markets are usually not very liquid. Who could the buyer be? Did the owner of the NFT just buy his own NFT to promote and push the price of the 100 other NFTs the creator is offering? What if some unknown person shows up and says: "I am the one who bought this NFT and I am not affiliated with the creator, but I think it has value". How many ways do we have to verify literally just 1% of that statement to be true? NFT price manipulation probably holds true for 99.99% of all NFTs out there. But as I said, when Saylor buys Bitcoin, at least we all know that some serious cash and trust and hope in the network went over the counter. That's in no way the same for NFTs.
-cut-
But there were definitely real players involved, and i doubt that most of them even knew what they were doing. I remember listening some podcast where even OG ape investors later found out that how those actually worked, and how the images weren't stored in the blockchain.
Some people just saw them as trendy and cool, or luxury items like jewelry and art that some famous people were connected with. I doubt that any of those famous people even bought them. But that they were bought to them for free PR.
But i am guessing that majority of people saw them as sign of "new money", tacky and worthless.