Not really no? A lot of crypto dudes entered the scene from altcoins really. Especially if you look into how NFT's and altcoins tied to crypto games exploded and a lot of new people were able to enter the scene through them. Granted not all of them stayed, but I reckon there's a good chunk in there that started learning and investing in Bitcoin. I reckon without altcoins (or at least, the idea of making your own crypto like Bitcoin), a lot of the current things we have right now wouldn't exist.

In the first place I wouldn't call altcoin a distraction, altcoins can basically be a promotion to Bitcoin really due to how most people would attribute the origin of most cryptos to Bitcoin. I wouldn't disagree that there are thousands of shitcoins out there though, but I reckon if companies were as easily made as cryptocurrencies, we'd have the same thousands of shit companies out there.