Recently, I've seen a bunch of profile picture swaps, memberships, and brand collaborations again, basically treating relationships as assets to be traded.

I'm not opposed to it, but I care more about whether there is ongoing content, rights, and consensus afterward, otherwise no matter how cool the profile picture is, it’s just a fleeting excitement.
Social mining, fan tokens, that set of "attention as mining," sounds like turning posting into a mining machine... but attention is too fleeting, today I follow you, tomorrow I switch to someone else.
My approach is still slow: first observe community activity, how the treasury is used, whether the rules keep changing, and wait until the fog clears a bit before considering participating.