You sound like someone that gets it and after reading further it appears you have built an app in this space, and this makes sense. I have too and your right, the coolness of the realtime web is also it's achilles heel. It's not that the web wouldn't be better off realtime, it's just that there is unlikely to be in most cases a time when more than one person if any at all will consume a shared resource. And now you have to account for the most sensible case being the static state of the app where you are over-engineering the realtime features that are not really going to be used that often. In my app I had a a channel state (realtime) and a snapshot state (static). Only thing that made sense in the end was the static snapshot state for content consumption.
Here is a short demo of the product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwkgGBrK_tA