The gold rush is over - private equity is going to squeeze every little drop from the companies that have been built and we will move on to Web 3.0 - which will be just like web 1.0 - self-hosting, link directories, newsletters, and guestbooks.
What happened was that the original web architects, loosely people like Jimmy Wales, had a different vision of the future than the one we're living in now:
1) The web was supposed to make nearly all information freely accessible with sites like Wikipedia and infrastructure like Coral CDN and BitTorrent.
2) The next step was to make computing freely accessible with stuff like One Laptop Per Child and distributed computing with SETI@home, BOINC, and something like a p2p Docker cluster running on idle CPU time, presented as virtual CPUs on your computer to run any platform code you want, perhaps 1000 to 1 million times faster than today, which hasn't been invented yet.
3) The final step IMHO was to make money/resources/time freely accessible with a p2p UBI system similar to Bitcoin, where joining it would start depositing money into a wallet by virtue of need (potential) instead of ability (productivity), like Patreon on steroids.
Instead the powers that be chose greed around 2007 after a long politically regressive period which undid much of the social progress of the 1990s, ending Moore's law and starting the transition to walled gardens and surveillance capitalism.
My life experience has basically felt like living in the alternate timeline in Star Trek TNG when the Enterprise went through the temporal rift and Tasha Yar was still alive. Not only did we NOT get #2 or #3 above, but even #1 has been steadily eroded to the point that search engines have started to not work anymore. It's not just that nobody is able to get real work done because they're working too hard to make rent, but that rent is increasing exponentially faster than wages. And that any forward progress is eclipsed by transnational moneyed interests who can use regulatory capture to control the US Supreme Court for example, cementing corporate money in politics, preventing the breakup of any monopoly/duopoly and defunding the IRS/criminal justice system to prevent enforcement of even the most basic fraud/antitrust laws on financial elites.
Which brings us back to what you said: just like every other time in history, it will be volunteers working in obscurity without financial support who bring us the next revolutionary tech. I really wanted to be one of them. But after so many failed ventures, I'm realizing that I could have made more money delivering pizza and gambling on the stock market. I'll probably have to get a regular job soon to cover expenses for my aging self and family, then be too tired to work on interesting projects. So nothing much will change - the cavalry never arrives.
If someone really wants to change the world, open source something that eliminates a whole market. 3D printed hand-wound cell phone charger cases, I don't know. Something that liberates someone from suffering and removes all profit so it can't be ruined by subscription spyware.