I agreed with you until your last sentence. Solving alignment is not a necessity for solving hallucinations even though solving hallucinations is a necessity for solving alignment.
Put another way, you can have a hypothetical model that doesn't have hallucinations and still has no alignment but you can't have alignment if you have hallucinations. Alignment is about skillful lying/refusing to answer questions and is a more complex task than simply telling no lies. (My personal opinion is that trying to solve alignment is a dystopian action and should not be attempted.)
My point is that eliminating hallucinations is just a special case of alignment: the case where we want to bound the possible text outputs to be constrained by the truth (for a value of truth defined by $SOMEONE).
Other alignment issues have a problem statement that is effectively identical, but s/truth/morals/ or s/truth/politics/ or s/truth/safety/. It's all the same problem: how do we get probabilistic text to match our expectations of what should be outputted while still allowing it to be useful sometimes?
As for whether we should be solving alignment, I'm inclined to agree that we shouldn't, but by extension I'd apply that to hallucinations. Truth, like morality, is much harder to define than we instinctively think it is, and any effort to eliminate hallucinations will run up against the problem of how we define truth.
Put another way, you can have a hypothetical model that doesn't have hallucinations and still has no alignment but you can't have alignment if you have hallucinations. Alignment is about skillful lying/refusing to answer questions and is a more complex task than simply telling no lies. (My personal opinion is that trying to solve alignment is a dystopian action and should not be attempted.)