Kaepernick is only considered a distraction because there is a certain contingent of fans for whom shallow identity politics outweighs any concerns about football, or indeed basic human decency, and the team owners just so happen to agree with their views and are all too happy to appease them. On the other hand, owners and fans are at best indifferent toward victims of domestic violence, and often outright hostile, and so they have no problem with giving the likes of Tyreek Hill chance after chance.
And besides, the entire sport of football is nothing more than a distraction from the drudgery of every day life. All of the drama and scandal that surrounds the sport is at least as big of a draw as the games themselves, if not more, and certainly will engage the average fan a lot more than indecipherable mumbo jumbo about Spider 2 Y Banana or what have you. Remember that sports media is largely just the promotional arm of the league, if the NFL wanted all the distractions to go away, they could just cut off access to the press and force them to publish puff pieces about how great everything is. But the league has realized over the years that controversy creates cash, and that having all of these supposed distractions enhances their product rather than detracting from it, as long as it's all silly stuff like domestic violence and drug abuse that no one really cares about, not anything that seriously upsets the apple cart like what Kaepernick was doing.