Essentially yes.
The knives were considered valuable because, aside from buying them, the only way to get them was unlocking crates. The crates themselves are worth pennies but the keys needed to unlock the crates have a stable price of $2.50 directly from Valve, with tradable keys commanding between 3 and 35 dollars depending on rarity.
The drop rate of a knife from a crate is something like a quarter of a percent, so you have to open approximately 400 crates to get one, with costs balanced out by the other skins you get in the process. As such knives in good condition with a desirable skin could fetch a high price.
The knife itself is a valued item because its the only weapon you cannot drop, and when you have your knife out you move slightly faster, so gamers chasing optimal performance pull their knives out constantly. As a result knives with flashy/cool draw animations gain value.
When CSGO made the mistake of becoming CS2 they introduced another form of cosmetics, the gloves, that are also constantly visible to the player. Thus gloves established a similar market presence to knives.
Really, the whole thing is pretty stupid, especially now that Counter Strike is a dogshit game, though I am slightly tempted to reinstall and play a few casual matches to witness the crash outs firsthand.
EDIT:
What Gaben did was make it so you could trade up 5 "Covert" grade, or Red, skins of a given collection to get a knife from that collection. So now the middle value of knives is plummeting, and the low end value of Reds is rising. Meanwhile the high end rare knives are still pretty high ($1,500 - $2,000) and the cheapest bottom end knives are still right around $80-$100.
