IPFS is just distributed content discovery and download.
Someone advertises the content to the network, then people looking for the content can find it. Usually the people who find it advertise that they now have it to the network too.
It has nothing to do with cryptocurrency but is commonly used as a great way to embed "larger" content into blockchains and other immutable stores. It works well for this because 1. The CID contains a cryptographic hash of the expected content 2. You can change where/how you store the actual content without updating the URL.
The tl; dr I've been given is that IPFS is essentially one global DHT swarm with some searchable/discoverable magic on top. Not exactly the same as DHT torrenting but close enough fir the simple explanation.
Sure it gained traction around Blockchain, crypto DeFI - but the storage technology is ELI5 a massive distributed storage.
I could hazard a guess that in terms of philosophy its closer to BitTorrent than Blockchain