The fact that such a great proportion of human knowledge is now available to such a great proportion of human beings is enormous, and holds enormous ongoing potential. The fact that every nut-job on earth ("The earth is flat!") now (potentially) has a platform is a huge negative, and the fact that on-line discourse so often has a beyond-ugly tone is a big negative as well. If the hype is simply "This will have a huge impact", without regard to positive or negative, the WWW stands out well beyond LeBron James, the Iliad, or anything else I've heard mentioned so far (No offense meant to LeBron or Homer).

I don't know, I have mixed feelings on this - with all the captcha, cloudflare gatekeeping, amp link, Facebook "free basic" and so much tracking and ads, the internet seems to be on a downhill slope so much ...

In addition:

- sites don't make use of link options (news sites not linking sources etc.)

- more walled gardens

- apps replacing websites

I think that's separate from whether it has lived up to the hype or not. It's pretty much changed everything, whether you think that's good or bad or imperfect.

I love this answer. You could say the same about Cloud computing. So much early hype and outlandish claims but it's kinda snuck into being a ubiquitous everyday thing we take for granted although in a different way from what the hype predicted. I wonder if the same will happen for 'blockchain' or 'VR' or other buzzy tech that look for a while like they won't live up to the hype (Looking at you IoT)

I was in highschool in the early 90s and wrote a paper in why the "Internet Superhighway" would change society, and got a number of things right (and of course did nothing with them and just watched it happen around me, sigh).

Got a C on the paper, mostly because the instructor found it too unrealistic and so not convincing. I misplaced it at some point, I really wish I still had a copy of it.