Decentralized systems are more powerful if governed properly, absolutely. But they won’t attract hacker types because they require ongoing maintenance and community consensus. When was the last email upgrade? HTTP and HTML have remained essentially the same their entire lives. Most of the people on the W3C are veterans, not “builders.”

Also Signal is open source, unless you have a different meaning of “closed video chat.”

they don't necessarily require ongoing maintenance, it depends how they are coded. some might even say the "correct" way is a non-upgradeable back-end (on-chain solidity contracts) and hash-addressed, ipfs hosted front-end. anyone can then pin the front-end themselves to ensure access or just run the code locally. dapps should rely on centralised, server based components as that mostly defeats the purpose.

uniswap is a good example. when they release an upgrade users must explicitly adopt the new version. in fact uniswap v1 and v2 still see usage despite the release of uniswap v3.

The Internet standards were built by "hacker types".

This can be done through a hybrid though, go off, build video chat, get some adoption and then leverage that to get consensus. “I’ve already done it this way I’m not changing it” is a dick move in an average PR request, but effective.

I was going to include this in my original comment and then deleted it, but you just described Netscape before Internet Explorer. You may enjoy the history of the img tag: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/the-origin-of-the-img-tag/