Why are processes requiring (almost) as much work as brute force considered an "attack" on a hash function?
It's just a matter of terminology, which (as often in mathematics and related disciplines) may not match your intuitive interpretation of the words.


An attack is any algorithm that performs better than the "obvious" brute force algorithms. Cryptographic primitives are designed to admit no attack better than generic ones, so any proof that this goal is not met constitutes a break (but maybe not a complete break) to a theorist. For more practically-minded people, it demonstrates attack vectors and techniques which may be useful in constructing more efficient algorithms.
If an attack is effectively breaking the system for realistic key sizes, it is often referred to as a practical attack. (And people usually proudly put this term into their paper's titles if their attack performs this good.) For well-studied primitives, this luckily does not happen very often.
Some papers describe attacks against round-reduced variants of a cipher: this again serves as a demonstration of attack techniques and (just like any other kind of cryptanalysis) is an important step in cipher design, because it provides an estimate for the number of rounds the cipher should have. Papers should (and usually do) clearly point out that they're attacking non-standard variants.


Then of course, unfortunately some (if not many) people have a tendency to oversell their results — there's nothing you can do against that, but the above should help in filtering for the kind of attacks you're interested in.