This is kind of my point, but this any many other articles and opinion pieces are just breathless with optimism about how the Internet Golden Age will come again and it will topple all the evil social media and we will have Life Eternal in a digital Paradise that no corporation can drive us from.

Well kind of? We, the enthusiasts, can just opt out of the social-media big corporate internet any time we want. But it's never going to happen on this grand scale that these starry-eyed people are dreaming about.