You absolutely don't need some crypto-based financial scheme to run decentralized web applications. Just some kind of open standard & a set of motivations and incentives to keep the system running and improving.
American ideas of decentralization tend to make the root assumption that financial incentives are the only thing that drive human motivation, so almost every decentralization project gets "blockchained" eventually, at which point progress on the core standards or applications gets halted because the attention, focus, and energy shifts to figuring out the myriad, predictable problems with adding "operate a global financial system" to your JIRA tickets.
I don't really know any way out of this bottleneck for Americans; they're simply too obsessed with complicated financial schemes to make clear progress on usable dApps.
I have slightly more hope for Europeans; if you notice the Matrix project has been chugging along for years, with millions of users, and is poised to actually compete with big tech products via traditional funding and company operation, like normal people.