15 years of Linked data experience here
It’s a useful tool, with trade-offs, is about what I can say
To know it well is a multi year learning curve. The complexity is very high compared with other technologies. ActivityPub inherited, some but not all, of the benefits, and quite a good chunk of the complexity
I would agree it is expert level technology, which suits a certain audience, mainly academia / PhDs and the some enterprises
Most of the time linked data is pitched via appeal to authority. Just yesterday a grass roots developer said to me about LD:
I hope [they] can popularize linked data without the smugness
I’d prefer it if the benefits were told. In Linked Data, everything is a Set. That makes merges cheap, but other things like arrays or arithmetic, hard. I’d actually say more than hard, impractical. However, in JSON you can do both of these things quite easily
As someone that coined the phrase “Social Linked Data” (which became Solid) my main goal was to achieve a distributed social web to compete with incumbents such as facebook, but open and where the users own their data. We’re still a long way from that.
We need lite versions of some of these technologies. Take the useful parts, but leave behind the complexity and technical debt. I suppose it’s a work in progress …