It's not a cash grab. Its an optional domain registrar. Feel free to start your own smart contract based registrar. Otherwise .eth domains are accepted pretty much everywhere as a substitute for a public key. ETH addresses are 40 digits long. Yes, you can copy/paste. But having yourname.eth is nice for user friendliness. Best part though is, you have a choice. And you can always register a domain much later if you ever feel the need.
Yep. Also note that ENS is a generic naming system, not just .eth names. You can also import in DNS names you already use, e.g. I own brantly.xyz on DNS and also imported it into to ENS: https://app.ens.domains/name/brantly.xyz
A decentralized naming system that solves what was previously thought to be an unsolvable computer science problem (Zooko's Triangle) that's open source and self-running, and where funds (that are raised with a minimum fee to prevent name squatting) go to a community multisig, is "rent-seeking" and "pointless cash grab"?
While I agree here, I want to clarify that I as far I know ENS still has back doors for the creators to control it until sufficient decentralization is possible and the core functionality has no major bugs.