You could say Filecoin is a distraction, but in trying to raise seed money, 50 VCs arranging 100 meetings, 5 verbally committing to you a measly $1M each and negotiate over investment terms while you try to live on ramen, and then 3 out of the 5 backing out in the process, is arguably a MUCH bigger distraction to getting any real work done. It also causes a lot of actual brain rot when you spend that much consecutive time away from tech.
And, just for the record, a cryptocurrency fund raise is simply selling access to given private/public key pairs which contain values, like a database. Even hardened by mining, these values and keys are intrinsically worthless until they are used widely for something valuable. It's when convincing someone it's "valuable because you think it is" that it gets "tricky".
I don't think thats a fair claim to make. There are many attacks on 'pay for distributed storage' that Filecoin addresses. Take a look at [the paper](https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf), in particular section 3.1 where we discuss sybil attacks, Outsourcing attacks, and generation attacks. We cover a lot of cases, and build in incentives to continually increase the amount of available storage and push down the price-per-byte. If we thought it was possible to properly incentivize data storage on ipfs without building a blockchain, we would have done so.