> Is there any chance of a hard fork? What about, let's say, a web 1.1 where we intentionally remove all the fancy new web APIs and mostly revert back to what we had in the late 90s?

Sure. It's really just a matter of mass appeal. We could fork the existing browser base and eliminate the new attestation API. Some projects are already doing this from what I understand.

What will keep attestation from being used is websites will lose business if their customers can't access the site. We went through this with user-agent string checking in the 90's/00's when IE and Netscape/Mozilla were at war and every site had a very strong opinion on which browser they would support. Even today you occasionally see sites that will hit you with "unsupported browser" errors if you aren't running a specific version of something.

The solution to this was everyone realized they were throwing money away by excluding a large portion of their customer base. At the time no single browser really dominated the market share so it was easy to see that an IE-only site was losing 33% of internet traffic. These days everything is basically chrome-based so this hasn't been as much of an issue.

So in the future we'll see this same thing. Non-attestable browsers will be locked out of attested sites and it will be a numbers game to see if sites want to risk losing these customers/viewers.

At the end of the day, you have to remember that everything on the web is just a TCP socket and some HTTP which is a flexible text protocol. We can build pretty much anything we want but it takes inertia to keep it going.