> But had they been adopted for what they are: well defined metadata according to vocabularies and ontologies that following accepted, interoperable standards, the development of ground truth and knowledge graphs would have been much more advanced that the current state.

Yes, this is very true.

As an addendum, I think many people in industry don't quite realise how prevalent RDF and RDF-based ontologies are in academia. They're one of the main ways researchers integrate data. No one cares about lofty ideals, it's about the usefulness of RDF graph model and the various associated standards built on top of it.