Federation, Tor, IPFS, DAT, CDJS, BATMAN, etc are all technologies that are tackling the problem of data/network ownership in some form or another and have been doing it for years. The current and specific uptick in "web3" references appears to come from blockchain projects all vying to be the next big thing.

From the article: "...the most developed areas of web3, like decentralized finance (aka DeFi) where literally hundreds of financial applications have been built on top of Ethereum..."

There's web3 in a nutshell. Hundreds of applications built with the sole purpose of extracting wealth.

Web 3 is already being commandeered by hyper-growth marketing bullshit, cool ideas or not it will end up being just a slogan to try and hawk technology to people.

If permissionless data provides value it will prosper in spite of the marketing buzz. Same thing happened in Web2.0. There is no real delineation between Web1, 2, 3, it's just marketing.