There are a lot of good points above.
Discord servers are usually an echo chamber of a general sentiment. People join them as part of a community, often with similar attitudes and/or opinions. If it’s a creator’s discord it’s not unreasonable to assume the majority will align with that creator’s opinion.
If you tune into a pack opening stream of a streamer who knows nothing about the cards or hobby (doesn’t have to be Pokemon), they’ll see something shiny – they’ll go “WOAHHHHHH BIG HIT!!” – and their chat will reflect that hype with “CRAZY PULL!!!”, “GRADE IT”, or “W”
Moreover, big numbers turn heads and get attention, that’s just the way it is. Dota 2 kept getting attention and press for its leading tournament ‘The International’ simply by having the largest prize pool of any esport, despite it not being the most popular. Frankly, that’s why I started playing it when I was your age, @Vertemes. Once the prize pool was reduced to an industry standard, its viewership dropped. We’re a greedy species and we’re fascinated by what we perceive as easy money. Ignorant people hear about cardboard being worth tens of thousands, or millions, and they flock to the attic thinking they might have the next Wayne Gretzky, Honus Wagner, Jordan, Illustrator, or Action Comics #1.
I also think your point about the discourse around
can be applied to our way of framing everything in this age. The term “GOAT” has become such a nothing term with how frivolously it’s thrown around and applied. The acronym literally stands for ‘Greatest of All Time’. By definition this should mean one. Yet somehow every fortnight we now have a Thursday game between two GOATs in the NBA. Laymen listen to the pundits, and the pundits are incentivised to get traction and engagement. When the JP PLAY Esp/Umb sold recently every owner of that card couldn’t help but post their own copy to their story or make a post about it. Posting to Instagram isn’t for the tenured hobbyist or pundit, because we’ve all read about them before and are familiar with the cards. We don’t need to read about them for the eighty-eigth time. Those posts are either for circle-jerking purposes or to garner engagement from the uneducated (different to collection update posts, which are usually supportive ones amongst friends).
People also have an extremely short attention span and memory. If you take something out of the limelight for even just a couple of weeks, most people without specialised knowledge will focus on something else. This is why there’s also a high turnover in the hobby of “collectors”, because people enter and exit just as quickly. People gravitate to the flavour of the month thing, which in 2020 was Pokemon. Now we also have sub-categories of FotM within Pokemon, which is most evident with new sets. A lot of set cards are expensive on release, then drop significantly when people forget about them.
@thsigma is very correct, people are stupid. They’ll parrot anything, ESPECIALLY if they like the person saying it. People think they have a clue. They (often) don’t.