That's a pretty tiny 'everybody else' compared to users, web and browser developers. They seem to be doing mostly ok and I still don't follow your argument that their concerns should somehow reign supreme over those of, you know, the actual everybody else.
It’s a tiny "everybody else" because it never was given a chance to develop.
Maybe you’d also say that the number of people that want to do their online banking with a desktop program that isn’t provided by their bank is a tiny "everybody else".
Yet in places where OpenHBCI exists, many people use it – and there is an ecosystem around it, e.g. KMyMoney can integrate with it, and there’s a small widget for KDE to show your current account balance in your tray.
If we had a machine parseable web, a similar ecosystem would have developed. When embedding links today, we use OpenGraph tags. But why? If the web was directly machine readable, we could’ve directly embedded that content.
Google search shows you as preview excerpts of tables on a page, with an easily machine readable web, similar stuff could’ve happened here.
Maybe instead of only embedding YouTube videos, I would have been able to easily embed any part of any web page into any other. Maybe I would have been able to easily embed any part of any web page in a desktop application. Maybe I would have been able to build addons that easily search over content of web pages, in a structured way.
This would be a more compelling counterfactual if the approach that won wasn't in many senses the most successful technology in the history of the computer industry.
