The leader in that space is Skynet, which basically is like IPFS + Filecoin but also has dynamic elements to it, and a lot better performance + reliability.
Cryptocurrency is helpful because it allows you to incentivize people to hold the data. If you don't have cryptocurrency, you're basically dependent on altruism to keep data alive (like bittorrent, or ipfs without filecoin). Popular files do okay for a while, but even popular files struggle to provide good uptime and reliability after a few years.
On an incentivized network like Sia or Filecoin, you can have high performance and reliability without ever needing any users to keep their machines online and seeding.
Does it scale well? SciHub is at least 100TB.
It might be beneficial to create something like what you describe without any cryptocurrency association though, and I've been mulling over possibilities for distributed systems that are inherently currency-less to avoid all of the scams that cryptocurrency attracts.