It's like "machine learning" and every other buzzword. People expect "machine learning" to just solve all the problems in every industry. It's great tech but it has limited use cases.

People "improperly" using block chain tech to replace traditional database storage doesn't make the tech a pipedream.

You are comparing apples to... potatoes? The whole point of blockchain is that it is immutable and intractable. It doesn't try to be a DB, except maybe in some abstract sense. Whether it will revolutionaze industries or not remains to be seen, but dismissing blockchain as an inefficient DB is simply misguided.