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NFTs actually do have a few practical uses, e.g. concert tickets, but the number is very small and the relevant industries are unlikely to adapt them anyways because capitalism
I agree with you, but concert tickets was a bad example, as that is easily centralizable. My go-to example to make people have a grasp of the type of problems this solves is games.
Imagine there was a store where you could buy games and activate them on any store you want to by only paying a small fee, for example you buy the game on that store and can activate the game on Steam, Playstation and Xbox only by paying the fees on each of them. This would allow people to essentially cross-buy games which is good for customers as it means they can move platforms or stores easier, it's good for game devs because their games would get more views across the board and their percentage is clean, and it's good for the stores because they get a clean cut of the cake when someone wants to activate a key.
Why can't this be done with traditional methods? Because there's no central authority on who owns a game, Valve has no reason to trust Sony and vice-versa. And even if you propose creating such centralized authority others might not trust it. A smart contract is transparent and auditable, requires no trust from any party and acts as a decentralized source of truth.
Using a decentralised system for concert tickets seems like an expensive way to take a centralised operation (the organiser sells the tickets and can manage resell / third parties) to force a distributed system (that will be less efficient since there is overhead ensuring distributed systems aren't controllable by a single entity)
The benefit is less about decentralization in this case (although it would be nice because fuck corporations, especially Ticketmaster) and more about the use of cryptography. The blockchain and non-fungible aspect allows people to buy tickets secondhand without a doubt in their mind that the tickets are fakes or copies, all without the need for a corpo-approved marketplace which make the rich leeches richer.
You can use cryptography in a centralised system too. The issues with the fakes is more that its not supported / people try to work around the system. Why would a block chain backed system stay that way after they are entrenched? It's layers on top and all those layers are separate layers that are trying to make money... that's where there funding comes from and why they exist. Why would they not go down the same path since owning their layer gives that control. I have friends that were working exactly in that space and I saw nothing that made me think they would be any better besides currently being smaller
It's going to be whatever new technology built on the shoulders of blockchain tech that works for this. Whatever they solve the efficiency problems with. Then it might have a fighting chance at being a currency, being used as provenance, etc.
I think AI's got a similar issue with the agentic side of it. Still needs another big advance.
But... why? The centralised database uses less power so it's a more efficient foundation. There are some situations where distribution might be worth that cost. A lot of those situations that people were excited about early on (a global currency / gold alternative) haven't proven to be robust to the overhead (although speculative investments and transactions you don't want tracked are working for some people)
All that said, how does a concert ticket ever fit into that foundation as a win... without bringing up a liberation type ideology?