Steem typically is slow to track market movements so it means that it could be possible that during the next bull run surge, traders are looking to follow the pumps through their coins and then sell across into real projects with use case. At some point, the music of caseless coins is going to stop and some people are going to find themselves without a chair.

This could very well be the case.

There is also the reasoning that Steem suffers poor distribution for a token designed to distribute an inflation pool

This is kind of true. But there are many projects with far worse distribution. It's just most other projects are no widely used and even when they are used a lot nobody really bother to check the wallet sizes.