In 2019, I wrote about the need for a web of documents [0], where I wrote about the importance of having static documents and sketched another approach.

Gemini is a web of documents. A rudimentary one, but very content-focused – the signal-to-noise ratio is typically much higher than on WWW. You can visit any capsule in the Geminispace and have full confidence that it’ll only serve you gemtext to read.

[0]: https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2019/10/07/web-of-documents/

On a technological level, the web that we have now is far better suited to being a web of documents than Gemini is or ever will be.

It's one thing to say "we're going to build our own silo of high-quality content", but another to intentionally cripple its technical capabilities, which is what happened with Gemini.

Gemini, the protocol, is extremely bad even for making a web of documents.

Gemini, the network of content, might have a higher SNR than the web - but that's no excuse for pushing a protocol that is flat-out hostile to the transfer of information and knowledge.

Images and video are significant content and while some text does just as well without it, like fiction, most text content is made better by images, video, animations, diagrams or drawings.

How can it be throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it isn't a replacement for X (and I assume you are implying X is the web)?

I love the idea of a set of technologies targeted at text, and only text.

Nobody is saying you can't have the web. I'm not giving it up.

On the other hand, I welcome the a place I can go and not being accosted by ads, images, videos and cookie banners. A place where content is king.

Because very few kinds of content benefit from purely text display. Books, documents, blog posts, news, etc all benefit massively from inline images, animations, and videos. It seems that Gemini users wanted to avoid ad tech and commercialization and lost all visual communication in the process.

Exactly - that's why I like the use of "anti-intellectual" as an adjective for Gemini - Gemini's design is anti-conducive to thought and information transfer because of the massive impact of mathematical notation, images, and animations.