I can't respond to all of your points right now but I am interested in your comments about the blockchain. As a developer in the crypto space, I'm surprised that you're apparently not aware that reputation doesn't need to be tied to stake in order to exist. But even more surprising is that you're making an argument that people with money can abuse the reputation system, when the very reason that it is tied to stake is to make it prohibitively expensive to abuse that sort of thing. Decentralized tribunal systems are in the works (I designed one myself in 2011), to further make the network more resistant to such things.

Regarding your comment about blockchains and query load, you also seem to be unaware as a developer that blockchains are a source of truth, not a front-end. A user request does not cause a query to the blockchain. A network of server nodes can exist, with cached results. The servers themselves can have their own reputation system, or the entire front-end experience can be managed by a single centralized entity without compromising the use-case of decentralization. Specifically, if the owners of the front-end were to act in bad faith, it would be much, much less expensive for someone else to spin up another identical front-end (most likely open-source as there would be a lot of early criticism if it wasn't).

Regarding expenses and costs, solving that problem is part of the hard work. If I were building the system, I would probably not start out with the entire Internet being the scope. Perhaps as a proof of concept I'd start with Wikipedia only. I know for sure that paying for each search query is a non-starter, as that has a psychological effect of being punished for using the service, when you want it to feel rewarding instead.