I'm not in love with NFTs, but many of these points are trivially easy to shoot down.

> artists are waking up to find that their digital artworks are being sold by fraudsters to unwitting victims.

As the author attests; this is just a problem with art, not a problem with NFTs. The potential reward for counterfeiting an NFT isn't significantly higher than traditional art, especially given how much cooler the NFT markets have become over the past few months, and the degree to which we understand how prevalent traditional art counterfeiting is (you'll notice this as a theme; cryptocurrencies don't generally create new problems, they simply make the existing problems of our world much more open and obvious).

The vastly more correct criticism to lobby in this domain is that, generally, the systems and mechanisms to prove the providence of an NFT will fundamentally rely on some kind of centralized identity verification (maybe just a Twitter verified badge); this is antithetical to the goals of crypto, in general.

Though, in practice, it is not antithetical to the goals of most NFT holders. And that's far more important.

> This comes hot on the heals of what feels like mania

History would remember "tulip mania" as a "tulip investment opportunity" if it had never crashed.

Point being, yes there are some signals which suggest that an investment domain is in "mania", and NFTs did relay some of those signals. At this point, the mania has died down quite a bit; but only time can say for sure.

A critical piece of information that many people fail to consider when seeing the prices these NFTs are sold for; they're purchased with ETH (or another cryptocurrency). CNN lists the price in USD. There are tons of people who, over the past five years, became "ETH millionaires"; they may have thousands of ETH, but that's different than millions in cash. There's nothing to spend ETH on. Converting it into USD, to go buy yourself a McClaren, would require a massive tax payment at best, and in many countries the laws surrounding this are so unclear, or straight illegal, that a fiat bank account suddenly receiving a $50M transfer may draw the ire of authorities. So; something comes along they can actually buy; they buy it.

You can argue against the utility of such a transaction. I'm not sure that's relevant, but I'd argue its actually massively utilitarian: Early adopters believe, one day, they will be able to buy a Big Mac with their ETH. Buying a random piece of art for $5M USD in ETH generates news headlines. Its an investment, both in an asset they can eventually, hopefully liquidate, and also in buzz to get more people into the system.

> Transactions made through the Ethereum wallet of Beeple are responsible for 78,306 kilograms of CO2 emissions

One could, with some amount of validity, argue that securely transferring millions of USD in wealth while only creating the pollutive equivalent of six UK adults is actually an improvement on traditional systems, considering the massive amount of "hidden pollution" our traditional financial system consumes.

The bigger issue is that this is an argument of per-transaction scale, and similar carbon outputs are generated even with smaller transactions. Gas prices are the biggest criticism of ETH right now, and the best solutions the community has generated to date are mostly new sub-chains (like MATIC) which don't have the same marketing momentum ETH does.

> there is still no clear timeline in sight for Ethereum

This is the big question. The timeline outlined on the official Ethereum site is quite clear; mid to late 2022. Whether they can stick to that timeline is another matter; democratic systems are messy, as anyone who has participated in the US government can attest.

Things are looking rather positive though.