I can't imagine it's anything but. This really took off when some very popular Youtubers found the product and starting breaking open boxes and you could see the prices just keep escalating from there. The new base series Pokemon game also had the fortune of releasing last year and was reasonably popular. I think it's a mixture of nostalgia and people really taking advantage of a market along with the brand still holding major popularity as a general media entity. I would imagine some cards will hold value to some extent but I'd be genuinely stunned if this holds as a long term value. With that said, I think some cards will maintain their value or a lot of it (especially those that aren't artificially scarce: early first editions, perennially popular Pokemon, etc.), but I certainly wouldn't be investing in these long term at this point.
I've been wrong before and people and their money but it feels too escalated with cards that really aren't that extraordinary. Like, the most famous card on this front is probably the original set Charizard. This is the one where the Gem Mint 10, First Edition, Graded, Verified, etc. version was pulling six figures. A standard one (raw, regular edition) is pulling an average of about $400 with a 4x spike over the past calendar year...but it's also down 35% in the last three months from that peak (it was selling near 600 just a few months ago). I spot checked several cards from this first set and this trend of "big spike from last year but down a lot from three months ago" is true.
The newer sets are probably different: people are still buying a ton of packs, trading is very heavy, value can be okay if you hit the right cards, etc. But people who jumped in three months ago are probably taking a bath on this.
