Why should I upgrade my car's CSS?

Imagine spending thousands of dollars on an item that will immediately start losing value the moment you start using it. Or has already lost a substantial portion of its value when you obtain it. You can increase its value by investing additional thousands of dollars into updating it, but this too continuously loses value. And there's a bit of one-upmanship going on: can you put together your declining thousands of dollars better than another person's declining thousands of dollars, while cordially comparing notes?

This is what I see in the world of car modifications. It was reinforced last week when I attended a car meet, where people display their cars and all of the modifications. I didn't go looking to confirm my biases. I went to hang out with my best friend, who I rarely see enough of, and I was genuinely interested to see if I could make sense of why people do it. But it seemed all I heard was: "I'm going to quad-charge my NFTSs and add FPSs so I can run at 7400. Pretty sweet deal at $3K, per fender."

Granted: some of the modified cars do look nice. And I'm not opposed to some embellishments of cars to accent its stock appearance.

But I'm a big believer that things should work right out of the box and need little to no dressing up. I could spend time and effort to root an Android phone to remove carrier installed applications and improve its general performance, or I could...you know. If I'm going to spend $X total on a car, I'd rather not spend a fraction of it at first, get a limited feature set, and then keep spending up to $X to get it the way I want.

The counterargument to that is the cost is spread over time instead of committing to $X right away. True, but that only brings me to my next point: What kinds of jobs do car enthusiasts have? How can they afford this hobby? I'd like to know because I may be in the wrong line of work. It seems like the total amount spent on someone's Civic approaches the price of entry-level luxury cars. And there are people heavily modifying luxury cars.

My biggest issue is not necessarily the money itself, but how little return there is on it. Modifying cars isn't sports where the competition results in health benefits. There's no immersion in some other world and sparking imagination like reading or playing video games. Learning how to play an instrument can have downstream benefits like songwriting. I'm not saying that everything needs to have some underlying deeper purpose. There is room for escapism. But I don't see any of those things here. I see hyper-competitiveness and money spent with little payoff for something that seems ultimately superficial. It's truly something I don't understand. At all. I wish someone would enlighten me and explain the appeal.