I think you are conflating two points.

> It's just too technically difficult for a normal person to make a useful reliable website.

There are many hosting providers from the hostgators of the world to wix and squarespace that make this pretty easy if you want to host content.

> That naturally drives people from the open web into closed web-replacements like facebook.

The social aspect is what drives people to social networks. All of their friends are there.

Many people don't want to just host content, they want chat, video, messenger, photo storage. For those that don't need it widely accessible, group chats seemed to have filled gap between forum <-> text message/email.

That all still relates to the technical difficulty of hosting (and, to be a bit more specific, account/identity management.)

Facebook doesn't have some magic technical secret that makes chat, video, messenger, storage, etc handled by their servers somehow different than if it were handled by a server in your home.

People think technology is "too complicated" and "magic" because they don't try to understand it. That's the problem. The "secret sauce" is in configuration and knowledge of architecture, software engineering, and production engineering, which are all gradually acquirable through sweat equity.

There are plenty of cheap VPSes all over the world where someone can run just about anything live without the costs of GCP or AWS.

Account and identity management is naturally slightly non-trivial, once you consider things outside the happy path.

OAuth is trivial because of libraries.

Hashed database secrets are also easy. Rails is mindlessly-simple. Django isn't bad either. There are CMSes that can provide these too.

The problem is people don't want to know anything about anything. They want something (results) for nothing (free, and without skills or effort).

> It just feels like adding rendering support to browsers for gemini style markdown and serving them with appropriate Content-Type headers over regular HTTP would be a better way to do it.

One of the nice things about keeping it separate is that clicking a link is safe. Relaxing. If the linked page wants to spy on you or run a crypto miner or bug you with stupid pop-ups or try to trick you into automatically clicking "allow" on notifications, it'll first have to pop a "would you like to open this link in [web browser]?" window or something.

Yes you can cut down permissions on the web but then 90% of it doesn't work without a bunch of fiddling.

That's a skills and lack of software (CMS) problem, not a blame-the-tools problem.

Dumbing-down the web is a dumb idea. It's dumb enough already and shouldn't be any dumber.