Yes, Raft (and Paxos) are indeed distributed consensus protocols.
But the GP is talking about distributed in blockchain-land, which uses terms differently.
In blockchain-land, it means "consensus among peers who do not trust each other".
In non-blockchain-land, there are what's called byzantine distributed consensus protocols, which as robust again deliberate subversion by some nodes in the network. Basically if nearly everyone votes one way, it doesn't matter what a few subversive nodes do. But byzantine robustness does have a cost (in time), so protocols are usually designed on the assumption that there may be faulty nodes, but the errors are not deliberate.
But even byzantine protocols assume the network is somewhat predefined.
Whereas in blockchain-land, you don't know how many peers there are, who they are, and you don't trust them. What you do trust is their motivations en masse, because there's money and power in it.
It uses economic and evenness-of-technological-progress factors to provide a level of collective trust. A core assumption is no motivated actor is sufficiently powerful to subvert everyone else. This assumption is not guaranteed by protocols, and can also be broken by collusion among large actors, because collusion makes them more powerful.
With proof-of-work, the assumption can also be broken if a sufficiently powerful new technology becomes available to one actor before anyone else. (I'm not sure what the situation is with proof-of-stake, which to be honest smells like RichGetRicher 3.0, but I don't know much about it.)
But the GP is talking about distributed in blockchain-land, which uses terms differently.
In blockchain-land, it means "consensus among peers who do not trust each other".
In non-blockchain-land, there are what's called byzantine distributed consensus protocols, which as robust again deliberate subversion by some nodes in the network. Basically if nearly everyone votes one way, it doesn't matter what a few subversive nodes do. But byzantine robustness does have a cost (in time), so protocols are usually designed on the assumption that there may be faulty nodes, but the errors are not deliberate.
But even byzantine protocols assume the network is somewhat predefined.
Whereas in blockchain-land, you don't know how many peers there are, who they are, and you don't trust them. What you do trust is their motivations en masse, because there's money and power in it.
It uses economic and evenness-of-technological-progress factors to provide a level of collective trust. A core assumption is no motivated actor is sufficiently powerful to subvert everyone else. This assumption is not guaranteed by protocols, and can also be broken by collusion among large actors, because collusion makes them more powerful.
With proof-of-work, the assumption can also be broken if a sufficiently powerful new technology becomes available to one actor before anyone else. (I'm not sure what the situation is with proof-of-stake, which to be honest smells like RichGetRicher 3.0, but I don't know much about it.)