Gnunet was and is incredibly advanced technology, solving many problems better than most p2p systems that came after, who never bothered to even look at those ideas, and implemented worse concepts from scratch (IPFS, veilid, libp2p...) However, it is exclusively academic, and the authors let themselves be distracted too much. The system was mainly developed by grad students who mostly leave after they have completed a barely working proof of concept for their thesis. It never had enough functionality running smoothly enough to attract a meaningful community, which would have been a prerequisite for a p2p network. It is so sad.