Your definition of a business might be a “an organization that produces a product”, but that is not the legal definition. A business can even legally be a bundle of paperwork that owns someone’s nice car.
In the rare case that a business actually produces nothing, in bad faith, we call that a scam, and fraud, and people go to jail. The same standard does not exist for "tokens".
1) There are literally millions of empty and bad-faith businesses that you never hear about because they successfully fly under the radar
2) People definitely (though, to your point: not the general public yet) call out some tokens as being scams. It’s much more of a “wild west” (aka: lots of dirty business going on that no one knows how to identify much less stop), but people in the space can pretty easily tell if a token has integrity or not. Look at Beeple, for example. I think most people who read the story would agree he’s not scamming.
A business is a productive asset. Cryptocurrency tokens are not.