MtG doesn't have any health downsides other than possibly being a marker for being too sedentary. Vaping has direct health consequences over "not vaping" even without nicotine.
The "safety" of vaping is predicated on being compared to "smoking cigarettes". If a bunch of non-smokers picks up vaping, that calculus evaporates.
Consequently, selling vaping to a non-smoking, teenage market should come under extreme scrutiny.
In addition, everything about the vaping experience is designed to be addicting. I had a friend who believed exactly as you do until he tried one of the flavored, non-nicotine pods. They have a very strong attraction.
I do not think you can develop a physiological dependence to Magic the Gathering cards. Additionally, the cards do have some market value, so it was more of a poor use of money than throwing money away.
Are you claiming that people develop physiological dependence to non-nicotine pods? Nicotine is very addictive, but that's why the parent poster said "if there’s no nicotine, then who cares?" People may get all kinds of strong weird habits with oral fixation e.g. biting nails and such, but that's generally not considered as physiological dependence.
Nicotine is not what mainly makes smoking addictive or even dangerous. There are plenty of bad chemicals that are much worse than nicotine that vaping could (and shouldn’t) include.
If they have nicotine, then who cares either? Nicotine is addictive when combined with other substances in regular cigarettes. Not as a stand-alone chemical.
(Of course avoiding getting any kind of particulate in your lungs is better than getting it.)
Nicotine by itself doesn’t seem categorically different than caffeine (coffee, tea, yerba mate, guarana, ...) or other stimulants (khat, coca leaves, ginseng, cinnamon, ...). Yes these are generally addictive, but not necessarily life ruining. Dosage, frequency of use, etc. matters a lot.
Frequent long-term use of any stimulant is probably not great for you; e.g. my mother has a pretty severe coffee addiction (she typically drinks 4–8 cups per day), and gets headaches and shakes if she goes a couple days without. But compared to other kinds of drugs, it doesn’t seem like such a huge public health threat that we should freak out about it.
I think you’re partly right. However comparing nicotine to caffeine is like comparing apples to oranges. They are similar, but nicotine affects the brain in a much more different (and arguably more addictive) way than caffeine does.
Maybe because of this list of research papers collected by Gwern claiming that nicotine alone doesn't have strong addictive properties (not beyond caffeine level):
I've smoked tobacco for 30-ish years. Organic, additive-free tobacco is definitely less problematic for me. Lately I've been growing my own Nicotiana Rustica [0], which contains plenty more nicotine than regular tobacco but is nowhere near as addictive.
I know what I would do if I was selling drugs and didn't give a crap about anything but profits, I would make them as addictive as possible.
To take it a step further (since it's something I've thought about), even if it is highly addictive, does it matter? It's an obvious problem with tobacco products for health reasons. But AFAIK pure nicotine isn't particularly bad compared to many things we consume, apart from the withdrawal effects. Though perhaps I'm misinformed there.
There are non-nicotine pods. And they have all of the social addictiveness even if they don't have actual nicotine in them.