My perspective on this is that it's about sustainability as opposed to trying to compete with big tech in a zero sum game. For example, Mastodon or Lemmy aren't able to compete with commercial platforms in terms of users, but that doesn't mean they're not viable communities. I can see a future where there's a niche open internet that exists independently of the commercial one and I think that would be fine. As long as there are enough people to do development on platforms and browsers and to produce content, that's all that really matters. In fact, a split might even be better because then we wouldn't have companies interfering with how the network operates.