They aren't even getting a picture of a monkey though, that's the thing. Most people don't understand that NFTs, generally speaking, have nothing to do with artwork. They don't contain artwork and they don't confer any ownership rights.

I think a lot of this was done intentionally. Because if you really did want to create an platform that used cryptography to confer ownership you would do it in a way that gave the token and the issuer equal weight. Because the reality is that the issuer is more important than the token itself. The token itself is worthless. It is the issuer that imbues the token with perceived value.

An NFT with an unknown issuer can be copied and the copy is just as legitimate as the "original", perhaps moreso. For an NFT to maintain any value the issuer must be known with certainty.

It is really no different in the traditional art world. If the artist is not part of the provenance of the piece, the piece is usually worthless. Platforms like OpeanSea intentionally ignore this because they want to trick people into thinking that NFTs themselves are artwork, confer ownership.

You can see this in how they tackle "fakes". There is no such thing as a fake or counterfeit NFT unless someone gets ahold of a known artist's private key. An NFT with a link to a random monkey jpeg is just as "real" if I mint it as it is if the original artists does if that artists is unknown. I can mint NFTs of every Google Doodle and they are 100% real and legitimate, just that they are signed with MY private key and not the original artist. The actual "thing" that is unique is NOT the asset being linked to, but the digital signature of the original artist. An NFT platform that wasn't intentionally deceptive would focus on confirming provenance through unambiguous identity verification of artists.