While I am somewhat entranced by the ideal, presumably the realities of SEO and how most of the web is funded would put a stop to it?

This is somewhat like the leap Figma has made. They were able to build their own walled-garden, offer value in it, and not have to worry about SEO. Most of the web is not in that position.

I'd imagine we'd be better off with more such fragmentation, though?

The internet was built to allow fragmentation, of protocols, of tech, of connections. It is just that, of course, most sites must flow to where the easy $ are. Let's just hope that enough good sites can escape the pull of easy $.

I think the short answer, is SEO is dying rapidly in the age of AI search engines. Search traffic is anecdotally being severely damaged when everyone can just get an AI answer; ad revenue is down especially after the pandemic; SEO spam is increasing from AI-generated websites.

We might reach the point of saying, screw it, it hardly matters anymore. The web has been conquered by LOB apps, Paywalls, and Walled Gardens; and there’s no real way to fix that, but there is a way to fix the tech we are using.

If anything, if we fully embrace “web as app engine,” we can fix some of these issues ahead of time. Maybe we have a standard entry point for crawlers (or users) requesting the raw text of a document. It’s better than being stuck in this awful in-between which we are right now.