I'd say it also revealed to a lot of lay people that the traditional high end art market is basically the same as NFTs. The value is purely in the scarcity and having enough other people paying into it to create inflated values far beyond the utility of the product itself. Even super famous paintings like the Mona Lisa aren't really worth much as art - we can create equally good reproductions, but those don't have scarcity so they don't have value beyond the work it takes to create them.

You can examine the Mona Lisa to study Leonardo's actual brush strokes, materials, underpainting, etc. It's hard to make an exact copy of it that can provide the same insight, though high-resolution 3-d scans (including x-ray/MRI/etc.) could help.

However, some artwork is lost to time and all we have are copies. Those copies may have lost important features from the original work, though they may provide additional insight into the artists who created the copies.

With digital works, one can usually trivially create an exact copy.