Nice story, but it's just a coincidence that the platform you found uses NFTs, as far as I can see just as easily it could have been regular centralized platform operating over Stripe or PayPal.
No, that's not correct. deviantArt and similar platforms have been around for years, and none of them have created the kind of income that NFT marketplaces have. Those older platforms were decent as communities, but their marketplaces were designed primarily to generate revenue for the platform itself, not as a free market for the artists providing the content, and it showed.