Not a hadoop expert, but that seems to be the case, more decentralized caching due to the way IPFS works.

If that's the case you could also boost the replication # of a given folder/file in HDFS and see a similar speed up. There are circumstances where IPFS is nicer by default, but it might not be something that is a clear winner.

I think this is definitely a worthy experiment if you'd like to dig more into it. The poster (I believe) is very thin on details, so more eyes are better.

Unfortunately I don't see the connector code, or the experiment set up.