We still don't know how that would have worked in practice. Even skilled people have trouble making trust decisions reliably for everything and while we'd avoid the compromised CA threat I'm certain we'd start seeing equivalents like dishonest or incompetent notaries – and those might last longer because fewer people see the dodgy results since not everyone is using the same set of notaries.

If it became popular, it's really easy to imagine something like the Great Firewall being configured to block outside notaries to encourage people to use local notaries which are still under the control of the local authorities.

That's not to say it's not interesting work or potentially a solid improvement, only that I would be extremely hesitant to make absolute statements about an untested internet-scale security protocol. The approaches we're seeing work now do so because they're adding to well-understood protocols (e.g. HSTS, key-pinning, etc.) or don't change the trust model (if Google goes rogue, Chrome users are already screwed).