"The technical issues are really interesting" is how you know it's a scam. It's like working for Facebook; they keep everyone interested by having them write unnecessary but interesting projects like new build systems and new PHP runtimes. Except that every contribution makes the price of ETH go up, and FB pays you.

I...think you just described society

It is, but there's probably more actual interesting development and design activity going on than you realize.

There's simply a real discovery problem, because of the aforementioned gold rush. Participants have too many incentives to bury accurate information that speaks against their investment, spread misinformation that embellishes it, suppress information about projects they want to invest in but didn't yet, ...