The fundamental scam is:

People want to feel a meaningful connection to others. One facet of that is wanting to own objects that were made by an actual person who put craft into creating the object and who cares about the owner being happy with it.

Virtually everyone, not just rich hipsters, wants this. People seek it out and are happy to pay a lot extra for it.

However, "made with care" (and not just "by hand possibly in a sweatshop") is a fairly intangible property and hard to distinguish from just looking at the object. Instead, you really need some amount of provenance tracking to tell the "made by someone who gives a shit" from the slop.

Maker fairs, Etsy, farmer's markets, and many other venues exist basically to offer up that claim of trusted provenance. But the very large price difference between what you can sell a made-with-care object for versus the very low price you can make an indistinguishable object using factories, sweatshop labor, or AI makes those venues a honeypot for scammers who want to sell, essentially, fake meaning.

I keep feeling like the ultimate answer to everything going on in the current zeitgiest is some kind of real trust tracking system so you know where a piece of media or object actually came from.