It’s actually changed for the worse. Now everyone wants their slop to be the winning protocol, so the competing standards problem has become far broader

I think that a million people asking Claude to build something is going to tend to converge on one protocol, not diverge. But the point is, I don't think it matters that much if they diverge. The whole idea of a standardization is predicated on the assumption that bespoke software is expensive, and that is now not always true.