It is an attack at a sufficient level of sophisticated analysis. If you destroy the game theoretic first mover advantage, then you destroy the economic incentive to improve things.
Given that model distillation has existed since the early days of the current AI boom, and no robust defense has been demonstrated, the available evidence does not support your theory.
Be that as it may, it would seem absurd if we start calling distillation out as antagonistic, but don't do the same for the SOTA models being trained on human-created data.