Rewarding miners for reserved but unused capacity is an explicit feature of Filecoin that I guess is intended to build up capacity in advance of customer need. These miners just did what Protocol Labs told them to do.
Reserves sure, but at the start you dont know how much is needed so to just assume reward for whatever show up is comically naive. It could take months for real demand actually using a significant portion of the storage. Pay everyone else anyway is literally trowing money away.
Just imagine if one of the large cloud storage player would have set this up and simply offered all their reserves which they could do as there is no way anyone would use it.
If they would get paid for that It would be very lucrative.
Without a contract? I'm not talking about smart contracts, I'm talking about real world, legally-binding contract.
If they just went and bought $200M USD of hardware basing on marketing... I guess that's the problem, right there.