> True, but i feel like central repos like wikidata are quite a bit different from the original vision of many small websites all interoperating into a semantic web.

One of the main roles for Wikidata is to act as a directory for these "many small websites" that enables them to interoperate seamlessly. You can look up a real-world entity on any website that Wikidata supports and use a third-party service ("Entity Explosion", see https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Entity_Explosion ) to get links to the same entity as it appears on Wikidata and other sites.