I most associate web3 with decentralization. That includes the Fediverse, IPFS, and (begrudgingly) crypto. Of these, crypto seems the most like a solution in search of a problem - Bitcoin had a problem, centralized currency, but fintech got ahold of it and treated it like a stock asset instead of a currency.

It seems a bit like the toxic hype is paralleled with true hype in a weird way, as if astroturfing was trying to draw attention towards their perversions. For instance, edge computing (true decentralization) is hyped as cloud computing (centralized services which are somewhere else). Language models (which can act as general-purpose inference engines) are hyped as chatbots which replace humans (very, very poorly). Or heck, crypto as a means to make money rather than a way to coordinate trustless actors - best use-case I’ve seen is FileCoin, which incentivizes people to host IPFS chunks, a measurable good to society which gets compensation.