First we would need to understand why people view scarcity valuable in anything culturally semi important, then turn that scarcity to digital scarcity and you have your answer.
But what do you mean by not being verified or protected? Their whole deal is selling collectables with an easy verification. That someone is stealing art is more of copyright issue, not the NFT issue.
Flipping physical collectables in ebay means you would need to be sure they are original, how are you going to do that? You need just trust the seller, you can't check the smart contract being correct one. Not to mention you would need a dry storage space to store them.
With nfts it's impossible to sell digital counterfeits that could be confused to be part of the original collection. You can sell copies for sure just like in ebay you can sell cheap chinese knock offs but no one wants to buy those and you could check them way more faster then physical copies.
I guess your question should be why price of altcoins is high as this is all about concept of digital scarcity.
Marketcap of BAYC is around 1 billion dollars while marketcap of doge is 11 Billion dollars. So maybe better question is why dogecoin has over 10x value to the biggest NFT collection out there. It doesn't even have links to pictures attached to the tokens
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You mentioned the possibility of receiving counterfeit physical collectables, however they still aren't perfect copies, because some details from the original artpieces can't be reproduce, such as quality of the material, color tones and brightness when there are golden or silver details. So, the "smart contract" in this case are the physical characteristics of the product which can be evaluated by a specialist.
And to acquire that kind of collectable really makes sense, because it's a physical good, which shows physical differences between the copy and the original, while NFTs don't present any physical differences, if I take a print-screen of any of them and reproduce it in different places on the internet. I won't have the smart contract, but they will look exactly the same.