> It was a major clash between the idealistic vision of building global interconnected communities and the financial reality of companies wanting to optimize everything for their own profits.

I think its even simpler than that. HTML et al was a nice idea but its largely ignored in the pursuit of making web pages seem like apps.

Berners Lee had this idea of documents like pages in a book, nothing like the full-fledged applications in the browser we get today, yet that legacy Berners Lee cruft still remains whilst people find ever more inventive ways to overcome it