It would be relatively straight-forward (technically anyway) to make a regular business around matching up consumers willing to pay and others with hard drive s

It would be relatively straight-forward (technically anyway) to make a regular business around matching up consumers willing to pay and others with hard drive space willing to host for money. But the benefit of a trustless decentralized system is that it can run without depending on a company. Once it's going, you as a user don't have to worry about the company going out of business, making changes to try to squeeze profit out, or getting bought out by a company who doesn't care about keeping the system running. You don't have to worry that it will get censored: you don't have to worry the company may decide they don't like content with nudity being hosted through it, that the company decides content has to all be reviewed for copyright infringement, that the company gets pressured legally to not do business with your country, that the company closes its APIs and cuts off your business built around helping others use the system in specific ways, etc. A system completely fragile to the whims of a single company can never become a standard like HTTP. (Though obviously right now the company is pretty central as the system doesn't exist yet. They're necessary to get it developed, make the tooling, do marketing to get the initial users in, and throw man-hours at making sure the system is good. Maybe they'll code in a small fee that goes toward themselves and people will accept it. Once the system is working in a fully decentralized way, people could choose to move to a fork that disables the fee if people thought the company was taking too much or was pushing for bad changes.)