This is great! I can't really endorse most of the web "innovations" that have happened since the Dot Bomb. There was a time before FAANG when people with low technical knowhow could build something on the web and start earning enough residual income to pay their rent. Like the eBay store on The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Or the Mutiny BBS before that in Halt and Catch Fire. I did it with my business partner via shareware in the early 2000s. Even though the writing was on the wall even then that this was all going corporate.
I think that things started going wrong when the anti-intellectual/anti-education movement gained prominence after 9/11 in the push towards privatization and outsourcing. Before that, we could rely on publicly-funded academia to deliver techniques designed from first principles to decrease our workload.
But since then, we seem to get leftovers like endless Javascript build pipelines handed down to us from the private sector. It's almost like best practices today are designed to mire a startup in endless red tape. While multinational corporations just throw money at it to create a billion dollar pair of scissors that we can't afford.
The way to undo all of that is to do the opposite. Realize that our freedom and prosperity start with our tools and techniques. Find the underemployed exhausted people and give them any resources at all to design better stuff and then leave them alone. Start funding bottom-up and middle-out policies instead of waiting around for trickle-down economics to toss us more scraps. Don't let any one person become a cult of personality preaching how things should be. And stop worshipping capital and focus on getting actual resources (the most important being time) to the middle class through automation and recycling to avoid war. This stuff is so obvious and evident in history that the main challenge is to unlearn one's own programming to be able to perceive alternatives.
Edit: we're talking about HTML not macroeconomic policy. But after spending my entire career having to do things the "easy" way because there's never any time or budget to do things the simple way, I view the complexities of the modern web and the barriers standing in the way of our self-actualization as one and the same.
Edit 2: think scholarships, grants and UBI - not loans, investments and contests.