Lot of people making comparisons to crypto / NFTs etc. Looking at it from another angle, what are the best examples of things that lots of people thought were bubbles, but turned out not to be?
This is going to sound ridiculous, but ecommerce? Between the .com crash, and a few high-profile failures like Kozmo, Outpost, and Pets.com, there was definitely an era of skepticism about the whole idea. Also keep in mind Amazon didn't show a profit for the first 10-15 (?) years. They had a decent reason for it (reinvesting it all back into the business) but they took a lot of criticism for it.
Was there ever a serious belief that ecommerce was a bubble? At least in the case of Pets.com they were doing things like free shipping and selling products for 1/3rd cost to try and increase their customer base. It was not sustainable. Mail order catalogs (the analog analog to purchasing through online stores) had been a major driving force in commerce for well over a century by the time ecommerce got started. As a model, ecommerce had something well-founded to draw on at least.
In many places there was a pretty serious correction in 2008, no?
Bubble doesn't mean "pops and value goes to zero". It means something more like overvalued asset class that can lose value rapidly. If there is intrinsic value, it won't got to zero. Nobody imagines that of a real estate market outside scenarios that include major wars, etc.
House prices with any sort of scarcity are largely driven by peoples ability to pay (i.e. finance the debt).
Ummm... It was a bubble in 2005/2006 and prices corrected pretty significanlty from 2007 till about 2013. We bought our house in 2010 (not quite the bottom of the market here) for $186K - 2.5 years earlier a similar house across the street sold for $250K. A similar house on the next block sold for $575K in recent days. So yeah, it was a bubble that burst and now has re-inflated to even higher levels. If mortgage rates simply were to revert to mean (about 7%) that will negatively impact prices. If they overshoot (The Fed could find that inflation is tougher to fight than they thought) you'll see a buying opportunity again. Look at some home sales stats from the early 80s when mortgage rates hit the upper teens.
If NFTs changed their image (can totally do that in most implementations, there's no hash of the contents) to an advert and made a lot of money, are they a success in a way that disproves a claim they were a bubble?
I'm not really stating an opinion, just an observation that tonnes of social media companies died until the current 'in' ones adopted advertising and (so far, and for longer already) lasted.
The internet. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...
Bitcoin. https://www.bitcoinisdead.org/