> democratize the operation of services/apps people use and depend on.
This is called "federation" and "peer to peer" and it already existed before "web2" and it mostly died because it was too much hassle for most people to bother with.
Both federation and p2p still require some kind of centralization, currently. Furthermore, there is no decentralized governance nor incentive mechanisms. "Web3" is simply bringing a decentralized approach to p2p, governance and operations. Doesn't necessarily mean a token that is traded on an exchange. But what blockchain (and more importantly the consensus models) bring is the ability to create a decentralized FaceBook, WhatsApp, Insta, etc. allowing anyone participating in the operation of the network and anyone able to consume the network without anyone profiting in the middle. I think where opponents get hung up is the incentive mechanisms. Today the good is so overshadowed by the scam/bad. But if you want a good example of a shared utility build on blockchain look at Helium.com. It is a global wireless network operated by people that host their own hotspots--a true utility model. When you look at some of the services we use on the web, they are utilities and there are real value in both delivering them and consuming them. This is where web3 is trying to tie that all together so some giant company isn't in the middle monetizing both sides.
Certainly, P2P services with federation require more people to put in effort, and for those that require each user to be their own node, unless they're designed to be very easy to set up, they're likely to fail to reach most regular people. This was part of the problem with the last wave of them, and could at least have been mitigated by better design on two fronts (first, designing the structure of the service such that it allows individual clients to connect to decentralized nodes run as servers, similar to Mastodon; second, designing the user setup process to make it easy to discover such nodes that fit with how you want to use the service).
But even with those drawbacks, some federated services were starting to gain some traction a decade or so ago. They died because the big players decided they wanted to own everything, and pushed their own services (see: all the various proprietary messaging services, etc).
Personally, I see decentralized, P2P, federated services as a necessary antidote to an Internet increasingly dominated by large corporations with a deep interest in harvesting your data. The problem is how to get there.
This is called "federation" and "peer to peer" and it already existed before "web2" and it mostly died because it was too much hassle for most people to bother with.