I thought the same thing when I saw that some of my favorite Twitch streamers were spending 6-10 hours to find a use for the item, and no one was asking themselves the obvious question. I feel the devs are mostly to blame, though, as the whole demo is structured around multiple endings and a small number of cryptic…

The situation is different because the demo has multiple endings and a relatively small number of items and things to interact with, and if some players knew that the dummy finger item didn’t have any use they might not have spent hours and hours trying to find a use for it.