There's an analogy to be made with the internet and WWW. In some ways everything did revert from the early wild west days of the web to a small number of curated and censored walled gardens (Facebook, etc.) but it's not accurate at all to say that things reverted to a pre-internet status quo.
I think you can understand a lot about a technology or system by who is hyped about it and when.
Very early in the bitcoin days, cryptocurrencies were pretty interesting because it was nerds playing with a new kind of distributed systems computational tool. "Hey, here's a way to create widely available data without trust! Neat, what can we do with that?"
But for the past several years, it's clear to me that the majority of people in crypto are excited about getting rich. They generally strike me as the exact same kind of people that would be prospecting in the Yukon in the 1800s. They don't care about geology in itself, they care about what they can sell the gold for.
Ultimately, those kinds of people are exploiters and extractors. They may generate wealth and some of it may flow outwards to others, but I personally find that they do produce little that has any real meaning. The wealth they produce might coincidentally get used for something meaningful, but even that's a crapshoot. No one remembers the name of the dude who found the biggest gold ingot and that's likely for good reason.
I don't think the early days of the web were similar. Yes, it was initially nerds and then there was a huge rush of people trying to get rich. But at least the ones trying to get rich were trying to get rich by making something useful to others. It felt less like a gold rush and more like the westward expansion. More farmers than miners. The web was a place to make new things and not simply a direct means to play financial games.
The crypto bros—despite spinning up lots of businesses and coins and pretty websites with fancy logos—ultimately aren't out to make anything that touches anyone's lives. Imagine if one day all of the money disappeared from crypto and all promise of any future money evaporated. You could still do all the same crypto stuff, there was just no hope of making a dime. The whole system would collapse overnight.
That's not true with the web. Sure, a lot of businesses wouldn't be able to afford to keep running, but many of the people making stuff on the web would do their best to keep making their stuff on the web, because it was more about the stuff itself than the money.
