Solutions to the Byzantine generals problem such as Paxos or Raft are more general than blockchain. And other solutions to distributed computing problems exist like conflict-free replicated data types. My problem with blockchain is that it is an infinitely-growing public ledger, and that while bitcoin needed it, not much else needs precisely that. Many things may benefit from something *like* blockchain, but not actually blockchain. And for a decade people have been running around with a beautiful hammer (blockchain) looking for nails to hit, and not finding any interesting nails (problems) so they started creating nails so that they would have a use for their beautiful hammer. Take git for example. It is both distributed and it has a blockchain. But it's not a bitcoin-like blockchain requiring some network of nodes and Raft to operate. Most problems can be solved more like git and less like bitcoin. Bitcoin is the only real problem I can think of that actually needs what bitcoin did.