Are people just minting inscriptions in hopes of profit later? Or is there an actual marketplace going on right now? I'm just confused at how many fees people are burning on these things. 

 You can check for the amount of inscription/ ordinal transactions on this mempool space fork (be warned, it's hard to watch)
https://ordpool.space/block/000000000000000000006e229b1e24b7220e1164fc138f0c1ad3e0fb4a3a3b51 

 After some seconds the ordinals transactions turn grey, the rest will be rather black